Read- Ings in Eco- Extrem- Ism #2

Atassa: Read- ings in Eco- extremism #2 on the cover: “The importance of boundaries and the circle and cross motif cropped up frequently in the decoration of ceremonial gorgets worn by Mississippian chiefs or priests in sacred ceremonies. Figure 3 depicts such a gorget, and it shows that the space beyond the orderly sacred circle was filled with horrible anomalous creatures who embodied the chaos and power of the outside world. By mixing the Underworld (a serpent’s body), the Upper World (an eagle’s wings), and This World (a panther’s head), the creatures violated the separation of the planes that was necessary if bal- ance was to be maintained. Moreover, the representation of male and female genitalia in the circular and elliptical designs that covered their serpentine bodies suggests the equally terrible consequences of mixing genders. Such monsters offered people a ter- rifying reminder of the need to follow prescribed social conventions to save their world and themselves. From the sleepy rivers and fetid swamps that represented the pathways between This World and the Underworld to the dark arboreal embrace of the forests beyond the pale of human habitation, the outside world that surrounded the Choctaws was home to many terrible creatures. Those who ventured beyond the circle’s safe confines could expect to encounter monsters like the Nalusa Falaya, the Long Evil Being. Its beady eyes, set in a small shriveled head, peered over a protruding nose and searched the night for hunters. When it spotted prey the monster crept up behind the hunting parties and called to them. Those who turned to look fainted from fright at the sight of its face, and Nalusa Falaya pricked them with a magic thorn to transform them into evil beings. Less dangerous was the Kashehotopalo, which juxtaposed gender and species in a truly hideous form. Perched on the legs of a deer, a man’s trunk extended from the waist and was topped by an evil-looking head. From its wrinkled mouth came a woman’s cry that terrified all who heard it. Other creatures infested the thickets and waters around the Choctaw circle, creatures that with one glance could force travelers to lose their way or draw them into pools and streams for a bewitched life in the Underworld.” -James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal, pages 23-24

Atassa #2 2016 licensed under creative commons paintings: sh Introduction: Caveat Lector

1 Hostis Humani Generis: eco-extremism, demonology, and the birth of criminality Adrien Rouquette

47 Some Reflections on Modern Human Action from the Eco-Extremist Perspective Ozomatli & Huehuecoyotl

55 A New Revolutionary Phraseology Jeremías Torres

63 Breaking Down the Bars of the Anarchist Cages: brief reflections of an ex-anarchist Ex-anarchist

69 Poem Krren oscuro

73 The PsychoPathogen: the serial killer as an antibody response to modernity Ezra Buckley

89 Tangled Hostility kohelet

93 The Mara Salvatrucha: the most dangerous gang in the world Extinción 1

99 A Statement from Innocence: a spirit from the South

103 Lions in the Brush: on the anatomy and guidelines of cell- structured resistance el borracho (nömad warfuk)

111 Paraguayan People’s Army: what can we learn from them? Ajajema 1

117 Letter to an optimist Jeremías Torres

121 Weak Words Concerning Human Reasoning Huazihul

125 At-Tux D.G.

133 “No Such Thing as Life without Bloodshed...”or The Force of Tragedy in Anti-Humanist Politics Magpie

137 Reflections on Freedom Zúpay

145 On Terrorism and Indiscriminate Violence Fiera

153 For a Metropolis against Itself Eleuterio Pinto Paredes

157 Out of the Self: a sermon for the dead Abraxas

167 Eco-extremism and the Woman Meztli

177 Eco-extremist Women Speak Yoloxochitl & More

177 A Note on Reproduction from the Eco-extremist Perspective CW

181 Eco-extremist Spiritual Exercises various

Caveat Lector What you hold in your hands is a dangerous book. Although those who compiled and worked on it are perfectly harmless, these pages have the power to make you a killer, a rapist, a psychopath, a fascist, or a hunter of anarchists. At least that is what its detractors think. Our intention has been to merely inform concerning (and yes, support in our own independent way) the growth of eco-extremism as a tendency, or at the very least its premises of eco-pessimism and distrust of all human endeavors. We go to dark places, but we are not necessarily dark people. We feel only that the best way to keep our sanity is to explore those areas of human existence that this society has sought to expel from hyper-civilized consciousness. So while we realize that you may have picked up this journal with the expectation that the editors will address the controversy that has taken place in the past year around Atassa, we will not be addressing any criticisms here. A response may be coming elsewhere, and we have a sense that it will not be too hard to find. But we reiterate here: pretending that bad things don’t exist won’t make them go away. Pretending that a brighter future is possible won’t make it come to pass. Shaming only works in a society where people still have shame. The best refutation of the aspirations of societal dreamers is the insignificance of the dreamers themselves. Often their “opposition” and “social war” don’t pass the severity of a teenage prank or barroom brawl, weighed down as they are by the morality of the average pewsitter at the local Christian church. They are easily forgettable and not worth discussing. At some point, the most capable of them will have to ask themselves a question: Do I want to be loved or feared? Do I want to be moral and right or calculating and dangerous? Am I going to keep trying to save a society that doesn’t want to be saved, or will I impose my own will and vision of what I want, come what may? Yes, this society is bad, it is destroying itself, thousands of species, and the last wild places left on Earth. Yes, it is bad, but the question (or challenge) is: Can you be worse? Can you turn that destruction around to oppose it in a meaningful way? If you can’t be society’s savior, can you instead be its worthy adversary? Do you dare at least try? When are you going to stop playing the role of innocent victim and try something else? These are not easy questions to answer, of course. But if you decide you would rather be dangerous, whatever that means in your context or situation (keeping in mind the laws of your country and punitive consequences), these pages might serve some purpose. If not, you would best not read any further. And as one must state at the outset of many such projects: Kids, don’t try this at home. Seamos peligrosos (Let us be dangerous). the editors

Hostis humani generis: Eco-extremism, demonology, and the birth of criminality Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. John 8:44

Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter. Maya Deren, The Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

Here begins the Good News of the Unknowable, the Hidden, the Inhuman, the Wild outside all comprehension: The Chaos stirred for the eternity of eternities, churning and churning in the unfathomable darkness. It was before all Fire, all Air, all Water, and all Earth. It stayed nowhere, obeyed no one, and was before the Master and Servant. There is no Thought in it, no Truth, no Love, and no Beauty. It grinds words into ash, and knows no desire. It is blind and sees all. Before it whispers the thing, the thing is already passing away. It is undifferentiated, but divided into a million parts. It is the unstruck sound that fills all things with its echo. Within the mire of Chaos emerged He-Who-Is. He crawled out and formed Time with his limbs. Like a nocturnal fantasy, he formed Order and the Good. He sculpted Beauty to bring things under his command. In a struggle with the Chaos, the Cosmos was formed, firmly established but also passing away. And they saw that it was good. Day and night passed. Then He-Who-Is said to Chaos: I will make Man to look upon what we have made and subjugate it in my name. The Chaos refused this, and a Great War began. The Morning Star shining in the darkness cried unto the Cosmos: “Who is like unto Chaos? And who dares to set his throne above the Primordial Darkness?” He- Who-Is made Man in his image and likeness, to battle the Morn- ing Star. He told Man that the Morning Star had fallen and had become the Murderer. He-Who-Is deceived Man to fight against Chaos, telling him that he was greater than it. Thus, Man carved

1 up the land and made a Garden. He subjugated the other creatures to his own use. With time, he could move mountains, change the course of rivers, level forests, and even change his own nature. But He-Who-Is is not greater than Chaos and the Murderer, his slaves cannot comprehend the Darkness that extinguishes the light. Soon, Men themselves will rise against He-Who-Is and join the Murderer, for the Murderer has always been prowling among us, seeking Men to devour. Men will descend once more into the Night without Dawn, the Silence before all sound. Like a leaf float- ing in a fast current, Man will disappear and bind himself to the Unknowable. **** The purpose of this work is to synthesize eco-extremism and nihilist individualism, to give a spiritual justification to a sentiment that refuses all spirit. It is a reflection on the scope and depth of human failure, and an approach to the Inhuman. We leave behind the Wisdom of the City, and Ideologies such as progressivism and anarchism that are merely a blink of the eye in the unfolding of the Unknowable. Here we seek to honor and praise the Murderer not merely as a passing political or psychological archetype, but as the metaphysical principle driving the hyper-civilized to extinction. We seek evil not as something that can shock, but as something that moves about in the shadows and cracks of human existence. We divide this treatise into three parts: 1. On Earth as it is in Hell: A theological reflection on the essence of demons. 2. The Satanic Sacrament: Individualist poisoning and human sacrifice in 17th century France in the “Affair of the Poisons.” 3. Bomb, Bullet, and Blade: Eco-extremism as a meager yet rigor- ous attempt to embody the struggle of Chaos and the Murderer against the Christian God and its secular manifestations. This text is not a political treatise. There is nothing here about liberation, self-realization, or human striving. We hate the human and everything it entails. We rejoice at the spilling of human blood upon the Altar of the Earth: its aroma ascends like incense before the Throne of the Unknowable. Yet we know that even these efforts are a feeble visible sign of the Invisible Grace of the Hidden.

2 We realize that the Murderer has been working since the beginning in many forms and manifestations, and He will not stop until the Human is no more.

I. On Earth as It Is in Hell

A. On the Separated Substances In modern political discourse, the hyper-civilized are trained to eschew all that is inhuman. According to this reasoning, that which is outside our autonomy, understanding, and action, is to be rigor- ously questioned and ultimately rejected. There should be nothing outside the human; to entertain the possibility of the inhuman is to entertain the possibility of one’s own slavery and subjugation. The free human is someone who stands on his or her own two feet, unrestrained by compulsions both internal and external. Of course, this is a fairy tale and nothing more. From the air we breath, to the water we drink, to the things we eat, we are surrounded by the inhuman, by the incomprehensible and uncontrol- lable. We merely hope that our fragile intellects and wills can with- stand the cosmic forces of fate that bring down the healthy man in his prime, or enable the abject lecher to live into old age. We cling to our concepts like idols—the works of our hands—and think that if we can only exclude everything inhuman from our minds and hearts, we will one day conquer it. This is the myth of the Enlight- enment, and ultimately it is the myth of the Christian God-Man. Sometimes to better understand the human, however, one must have recourse to the dream of the inhuman. Here we refer to spirits or “separated substances” in theological parlance. Whether or not spirits exist, they have formed an essential element of Western Christian thought. Their being haunts the highest levels of philosophy to this day. I speak specifically of the Christian entities known as angels. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser states the following: “You do not have to believe in angels in order to find the notion of philosophical interest. Working out the implications of the idea of a purely incorporeal intellect is useful for understanding the nature of the intellect, the nature of free choice and its relationship to the presence or absence of the body, the nature of time, and other issues too. In fact there is such a thing as

3 rational angelology, and here as elsewhere Aquinas often surprises with his demonstration of how much might be established via purely philosophical arguments.” (“Cartesian Angelism”) The Aquinas mentioned here is of course St. Thomas Aqui- nas, the thirteenth century philosopher and theologian who is tre- mendously influential in Catholic and Western thought. Aquinas described the angelic nature in various texts as a part of a tableaux of the medieval cosmos: the hierarchy of spiritual and material beings that constitutes the Great Chain of Being. Just as non-human animals are below Man, so Man is below the angels, and all things are infinitely below the unfathomable Majesty of the Creator: He- Who-Is, the Unmoved Mover and Uncaused Cause. Aquinas com- ments about the necessity of the existence of incorporeal creatures, the angels, in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae: “...There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat. Now, God produces the creature by His intellect and will. Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty; for every body is limited to ‘here’ and ‘now.’ Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.” For Aquinas, the highest faculty of the rational creature (angel and man) is the intellect. To know is to become something immaterially: to know an apple is to abstract the being of the apple into the mind, to consume it and “become” it intentionally (i.e. immaterially). At times we humans feel that we are the masters of these ideas, or even their creators, but that is because we, as blank slates at birth, become things immaterially so well that we feel that the world is part of us, when in reality, the opposite is the case. For the individualist in particular, belief in a realm of wiser entities above human beings can be a powerful weapon against anthropocentrism. No matter how great our knowledge may seem, it is but a flicker of the blazing light of existence itself. As the philosopher Josef Pieper states: “Accordingly, for St. Thomas, the unknowable can never denote some-

4 thing in itself dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a finite faculty of knowledge cannot absorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated completely, it eludes the effort to comprehend it…”(60) Pieper further states that contact with the light makes us immediately understand that the sun’s brightness greatly transcends our power of vision. By analogy, our own intellective powers are by no means the highest ones in the universe, as Pieper summarizes: “There is a well-known sentence in Aristotle which says: ‘As the eyes of bats are dazzled by sunlight, so it is with human intelligence when face to face with what is by nature most obvious.’ In his commentary on this sentence, Thomas thoroughly accepts its whole significance, but goes on to underline its positive aspect in this magnificent formulation: ‘Solem etsi non videat nycticoracis, videt tamen eum oculus aquilae,’ though the eyes of the bat do not avail to behold the sun, it is seen by the eye of the eagle.” (70-71) Our understanding is always flawed, and it forms over a long period of sensing and experiencing external things. According to Aquinas and the rest of Catholic theology, this is not the case with the angelic nature. The angelic nature is substantially superior to human knowledge because the knowledge of all things is infused into the intellect of the angels at the moment of their creation. The spirits are thus given a “cheat sheet,” or to use the analogy cited above, an eagle’s eye view, that makes them substantially more powerful and intelligent than humans, who are the lowest of the spiritual creatures endowed with will and understanding. As the 20th century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain states, “The deepest quality of angelic cognition is not that it is intuitive or innate, but that it is independent of external objects. The ideas of pure spirits have no proportion with ours. As they are resolved in the very truth of God and not in the truth of external objects, these infused ideas are a created likeness, and as it were a refraction, in the angelic intellect of the divine ideas and the uncreated light where all is life. So that they represent things just in so far as things derive from the divine ideas, for the angels have thus received, at the first instant, the seal of likeness, which made them full of wisdom and perfect in beauty—tu signaculum similitudinis, plenus sapientia et perfectus decore—and God, as St. Augustine says, produced things intelligibly in the knowledge of spirits before producing them really in their own being.” (68) If the Light of Existence passes through Man’s intellect as sun-

5 light would through a paper or a curtain, it passes through the Angelic Mind as if through glass or a prism: pure, ineffable, and full of splendor. The human, who receives all knowledge from the senses, knows little about himself as a sensing and thinking being. Thus, self-reflection and self-knowledge for the human are difficult. For the angel, the opposite is the case, as Dominican theologian Serge- Thomas Bonino states in his recent book on the angels: “An angel is therefore pure self-awareness. He is transparent to himself and sees himself to his innermost depths. Thus he realizes that perfect noetic self-possession, that spiritual grasp of himself, that is the ideal of every spirit and the highest form of unity and being.” (141) Being closer to God in intellect, the angel is also closer to God in power as well, being cooperative with the Divine Will in sustaining the cosmos. According to the mysterious Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the angels are divided into nine choirs, with the higher choirs serving the Throne of God directly, and the lower choirs helping to govern creation. Since angels like humans are rational creatures, they have an intellect and a free will. In other words, they understand things and act freely upon them. Rational creatures move themselves with freedom unlike, in the Christian understanding, animals who move through instinct (as if through a computer program) or inanimate objects that are moved by things external to them. In the Christian understanding, even the excellence of human or the angelic nature is a small thing compared with participation in the Divine Nature, that is, union with God as the Source of Ultimate Good. Such a Good cannot be achieved via the natural faculties of either angel or man, since it is infinitely above them in power and majesty. God must give this Union as a gift, and Angel or Man has to freely accept it. With man, according to Christian belief, this choice happens over the course of a lifetime by obtaining the grace given to man through Jesus Christ, with one’s choice for or against salvation being frozen at one’s death. For the angel, however, this decision to freely accept the gift of participation in the Divine Nature happened right after their creation, and the decision was final for the rest of eternity.

6 Those who accepted God’s gift are known as angels, and those who rejected it are what are now known as demons.

B. “I Saw Satan Fall like Lightning…” (Luke 10:18) The fall of the angels from the heights of heaven is a common trope in Western culture. For Aquinas and subsequent theologians, the most important concept to keep in mind is that the angelic nature did not change among the demons, only the right ordering of their faculties (intellect and will) toward the Divine Goodness and Gov- ernance. The fallen angels thus remained immaterial as well as ex- ceptionally intelligent and powerful beings. The story is usually told that some angels, led by Lucifer—the Highest Seraphim and Chief Angel—denied God’s ordering of the cosmos and were thrust into Hell because of it. Lucifer then became Satan, the adversary, the highest force for evil in the universe. Here we will discuss the reasons why some theologians thought that this occurred. Far from a discussion of theological minutiae, I think it profoundly concerns the nature of freedom and evil as applied to our circumstances. I will address two separate schools of thought when approach- ing this question. The Thomist school claims that the angels became demons due to clinging to their own excellence rather than humbling themselves to achieve the Divine Excellence through cooperation with God’s right ordering of the cosmos. It should be noted that, since the angelic nature is far superior to the human nature (due to its immateriality), an angel cannot sin out of weakness (as people can have momentary lapses in judgment and commit any number of mistakes because of them). Aquinas summarizes this insight also in the Summa Theologiae: “…[T]here can be no sin when anyone is incited to good of the spiritual order; unless in such affection the rule of the superior be not kept. Such is precisely the sin of pride—not to be subject to a superior when subjection is due. Consequently the first sin of the angel can be none other than pride.” Aquinas further clarifies this point in a later work,The Disputed Questions on Evil, when asking the question concerning the cor- rupting of the angelic will: “And substances without bodies have only one kind of knowledge, namely, intellectual knowledge, which the rule of God’s wisdom should direct. As

7 so their will can have evil because it does not follow the ordination of the higher rule, namely, God’s wisdom. And devils in this way became evil by their will.” (On Evil, 449) Aquinas states in another question in the same work: “To be like God as befits each thing is praiseworthy. But one who desires likeness to God contrary to the ordination established by him desires wickedly to be like God.” (ibid, 457) Here there are shades of the Genesis myth and the eating of the forbidden fruit on the Garden of Eden. So we can set up the Thomist telling of the fall of the angels as follows: the angels were created and given a choice by their Creator to cooperate with the manner by which he ordered the universe. However, the fallen angels preferred to trust the wisdom that was given to them upon their Creation rather than the direct wisdom of the Creator who is superior to them and governs the whole. In other words, these fallen angels became the first individualists: they preferred their own excellence and well-being to the greater excellence and well-being that they would acquire by cooperating with the Common Good ordained by God. They preferred the excellence that was entirely their own to the greater excellence that would be bestowed on them as part of a collective (subjugated to God, of course). While this explanation proceeds from one of the most es- teemed authors of the Christian Church, it is by far not the most popular or well-received explanation for the fall of the angels. A far more popular explanation has to do with the creation of Man himself, and the envy and confusion that this caused in the angelic ranks. This explanation is so potent in the monotheistic consciousness that it is reflected in Islam, in the Seventh Surah of the Quran: “We said to the angels, ‘Bow down before Adam;’ so they bowed down, except for Satan; he was not of those who bowed down. He said, ‘What prevented you from bowing down when I have commanded you?’ He said, ‘I am better than he; You created me from fire, and You created him from mud.’ He said, ‘Get down from it! It is not for you to act arrogantly in it. Get out! You are one of the lowly!’ “ In the Christian tradition, the angelic relationship with a lower intellectual being (Man) was compounded by the Mystery of the Incarnation: God’s plan to unite his nature with Man in the person

8 of Jesus Christ and not with an angel. Fr. Pascal Parente summarizes this insight in the following passage: “Some theologians believe that one of the reasons of Satan’s rebellion and disobedience was that fact that God revealed to the Angels the great things He had in store for man, elevation to the supernatural order, the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Hypostatic Union, the Virgin Mother of God, Mary… Envy and pride were, it seems, the cause of Satan’s rebellion and fall. Man reminds him always of his fall and his misery, hence his hatred and the relentless campaign against man with the intention of making him an associate in his own misery and despair.” (62) Lucifer-turned-Satan and his band of fallen angels thus adopted an attitude expressed by John Milton in Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Towards human beings, those instruments of God’s will made in his image and likeness, the demons could have nothing but contempt. The Malleus Maleficarum, the guide for witch-hunting in early modernity, summarized the hostility of Satan to the human race stating, “If he were permitted to by God, the Devil would certainly destroy man as a result of the enmity that impels him against man.” (103) Satan makes his first appearance in divine revelation in the Book of Genesis as the tempter of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Through his inciting the first man and woman to disobedience, Satan or the Devil brings death and suffering into the world through sin. We cite Parente again: “The Devil who was ‘a murderer from the beginning’ has continued his murderous activity with the children of man. Ever since original sin he has exercised a reign of death—the imperium mortis— over mankind, so that in a spiritual sense he became ‘the prince of this world’ by making man a slave to sin. Satan with the assistance of his demons extends this ‘reign of death’ in three principal manners: by seductive temptations; by diabolical obsessions and possessions; by all sorts of black magic, spiritism, and superstitious idolatry.” (60) Satan and his demons were not only deemed the lords of the world in a moral sense, but also in a physical sense. St. Paul in The Epistle to the Ephesians states that the struggle of the godly is, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high

9 places” (Ephesians 6:12). Pope John XXII stated in a sermon in 1332 that, “the damned, that is, the demons, could not tempt us if they were secluded in hell. That is why one must not say that they reside in hell, but in fact in the entire zone of dark air, whence the path is open to them to tempt us.” (Boreau, 25) The early Christians employed exorcisms against demons in their worship since they considered the world to be possessed by Satan and his angels and thus in need of purification. For example, exorcisms were commonly performed before baptism in the Cath- olic Church to eject the evil spirits that were assumed to occupy the person before receiving the cleansing waters of the sacrament: “I cast you out, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Depart and stay far away from this servant of God… For it is the Lord Himself who commands you, accursed and doomed spirit, He who walked on the sea and reached out His hand to Peter as he was sinking. So then, foul fiend, recall the curse that decided your fate once for all. Indeed, pay homage to the living and true God, pay homage to Jesus Christ, His Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Keep far from this servant of God… for Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, has freely called him to His holy grace and blessed way and to the waters of baptism.” (Rituale Romanum) Similar ceremonies were used to consecrate inanimate objects like bells, chalices, and other items reserved for liturgical use. Even storms and swarms of locusts were deemed to be targets of potential exorcism if the need arose. In the life of St. Gregory the Great, an influential pope of antiquity, it was said that a nun was possessed by a demon simply by her failure to make the Sign of the Cross over a leaf of lettuce prior to eating it. (Boreau, 94) The premise was that, even after Jesus Christ’s triumph over Satan on the Cross, the demons are able to continue their destructive activity until the end of the world. Demons could even haunt entire blood lines, forming a legacy of generational spirits that incline an entire family to a particular vice for generations. (Ripperger, “Generational Spirits”) Thus, Satan is considered the “lord of this world” since he im- pedes the immortal and impassible life willed by God for Man. The devil is the master of the desert places and the wilderness, as the ceremony of Atonement in the Hebrew Temple indicated: a goat was infused with the sins of the people and then cast out into the

10 wild. (Leviticus 16: 18) Later the first Christian ascetics would go off into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine to do spiritual battle with the devils there.

C. Image and Likeness Before proceeding further, an extended note is appropriate concerning the anthropocentric nature of the Christian (and thus West- ern) vision. Not only is the human the possessor of Truth in the Christian cosmos, but the human is the truth, full stop. Or rather, the Human Person is the meaning of existence, as an image of the One God in Three Divine Persons (ὑπόστασις). The integrity of the human person is enshrined in the Christian system of thought, and that system has been passed down and “purified” in secular forms such as liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, and even fascism. The Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky described the vision of Man made in the image and likeness of God through the thought of the fifth century Father of the Church, St. Gregory of Nyssa: “...[W]hen [Gregory] speaks of the image that is limited to the sharing of certain benefits that is to the image in the state of becoming, he sees the proper character of man created in the image of God, primarily in ‘the fact that he is freed from necessity, and not subject to the domination of nature, but able freely to follow his own judgment. For virtue is independent and her own mistress.’ Freedom is, so to speak, the ‘formal’ image, the necessary condition, for the attainment of perfect assimilation to God. Because created in the image of God, man is to be seen as a personal being, a person who is not controlled by nature, but who can himself control nature in assimilating it to its divine Archetype.” (119-120) Another Russian theologian, Leonid Ouspensky, summarizes the image of God in man through its cosmic implications: “Man is a microcosm, a little world. He is the center of created life, and therefore, being in the image of God, he is the means by which God acts in creation. It is precisely in this divine image that the cosmic meaning of man is revealed, according to the commentary of St. Gregory of Nyssa. Creation participates in the spiritual life through man. Placed by God at the head of all visible creatures, man must realize in himself the union and harmony of everything and unite all the universe to God, in order to make of it a

11 homogeneous organism where God would be ‘all in all,’ for the final goal of creation is its deification.”(185-186) The truth of Man is Jesus Christ as the New Adam: True God and True Man, come to restore mankind’s dignity and heal it of the beastly habit of sin. Another Father of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyon in his work Adversus Haereses, summarized the intercon- nection between God and man, and man’s ultimate meaning in creation: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei. (The glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.) The Orthodox liturgy itself repeatedly calls God φιλανθρώπως, or Lover of Mankind. Demetrios Constantelos contextualizes this title as a manifestation of Christian communion: “As God made no distinction because of his love for all, man's love was exercised toward all, transcending sex, race, and national boundaries. Funda- mentally, all theologians, Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers expressed the view that philanthropia is one of the paramount properties of God expressing itself in his relationship with man; and, therefore, man ought to possess the same attribute and to apply it for the benefit of his fellow man.” (“The Lover of Mankind”) Lest we think that these lofty visions of Man are merely the prejudices of Christian antiquity, we quote here the Oration on the Dignity of Man by the Renaissance philosopher, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsur- passable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, ‘from their mother's womb’' all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father,

12 Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures… Who then will not look with wonder upon man, upon man who, not without reason in the sacred Mosaic and Christian writings, is designated sometimes by the term ‘all flesh’ and sometimes by the term ‘every creature,’ because he molds, fashions, and transforms himself into the likeness of all flesh and assumes the characteristic power of every form of life? This is why Evantes the Persian in his exposition of the Chaldean theology, writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many which are extrane- ous and adventitious: whence the Chaldean saying: Enosh hu shinnujim vekammah tebhaoth haj (‘man is a living creature of varied, multiform, and ever-changing nature.’)” Passing into more modern thinkers, we come to Georg Wil- helm Friedrich Hegel’s idea of Reason manifesting itself in Nature and re-forming it in its image and likeness, or as Karl Marx would put it in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Nature becomes the “inorganic body of Man.” Élisée Reclus, 19th century anarchist geographer, was even more explicit in stating that “Man is nature having become self-conscious.” (Ishill, “Elisée Reclus' Opti- mism”) Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov posited that the meaning of Man’s existence as a thinking thing was crucial to the salvation of the universe, as one researcher summarizes: “Addressing the physicist idea of the ‘entropic death of the universe’ and using a combination of Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza’s concept of attribute, Ilyenkov claimed that thought is a necessary attribute of matter. Not only it is able to prevent the terminal entropy of the universe, it can also re-launch its nuclear reactions in a final self-sacrificial explosion. For Ilyen- kov, communism was the necessary political condition for the achievement of fully developed power of thought, embodied in science and technologies, and, consequently, for the re-launch of the universe and the prevention of its otherwise irreversible collapse.” (Penzin, “Contingency and Necessity in Evald Ilyenkov’s Communist Cosmology”) Thus, even a Soviet atheist returns to the theme of Man as the Savior of visible and invisible creation. Not to be outdone, religious figures in the modern era continue to see the meaning of the cosmos as the dignity and exaltation of Man. Jesuit paleontologist and controversial theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin merged Chris- tology and evolution by indicating Jesus Christ, the New Adam

13 and God-Man, was the apex of the development of creation: “Teilhard thus follows the evolutionist understanding of an evolutionary progression from inanimate matter through primitive life and invertebrates to fish, amphibia, reptiles, mammals, and finally man; always an increase in consciousness. With man a threshhold is crossed—self-conscious thought, or mind, appears. But even humans do not represent the end-point of evolution, for this process will continue until all humans are united in a single Divine Christ-consciousness, the ‘Omega Point’, so-called after the last letter of the Greek alphabet—hence the Hellenistic statement attributed to Christ (but unlikely to be said by him, as he would not have known Greek –‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end’). Teilhard- ian cosmology thus revolves around the idea of an evolutionary progression towards greater and greater consciousness, culminating first in the appearance of self-conscious mind in humankind, and then in the Omega point of divinisation of humanity.” (Kazlev, “Teilhard de Chardin's Evolutionary Philosophy”) A far more orthodox Christian figure, (now St.) Pope John Paul II, stated the following in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, written in the late 1970s: “Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated, in a unique, unrepeatable way, to the mystery of man and entered his ‘heart.’ Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: ‘The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom 5:14), Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.’ And the Council continues: ‘He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man.” Secular or sacred, reactionary or revolutionary, the one dogma that cannot be dismissed is the absolute supremacy of Man as a special being in the cosmos. He cannot even be considered an animal, for even that seems a form of sacrilege to religious person and athe-

14 ist alike. The entire meaning of existence is Man, and if things have no use for him, they should be disposed of, or at best ignored. With the doctrine of the Supremacy of Man come the Doctrines of the Fall into Sin and of Redemption with the subsequent Restoration of Paradise (one that is either heavenly, or of the workers, or “feral”). Having described these myths to which the hyper-civilized adhere, we can continue our discussion concerning the demonic legions as the enemy of Mankind.

D. Corpus Diaboli I will discuss here how demons behave and how they wage their war on mankind. Bonino writes that the first characteristic of the demons is that they remain hierarchical since they retain the nature ordered by God. (The Catholic cosmos is conceived of as being rightly ordered and authoritarian.) Thus, “it must be admitted that by virtue of their unequal angelic nature some demons exercise authority over others: there are superiors (praelati) among them.” (280) Satan is the “leader of all destined for ruin,” the Head of the City of Evil parallel to the City of God: “The City of Evil constitutes as it were the corpus diaboli [body of the devil] opposed to the body of Christ [i.e. the Church].” (ibid, 281) Bonino then describes that the union of devils arises not out of solidarity, but out of a common destructive goal: “...[T]his subjection to the natural head is subjectively accepted by each demon not through political friendship (since demons detest one another), but with the perverse intention of acquiring through their complicity a greater effectiveness in their work of destruction. In short, it is a confederation welded together by a common hatred of God and men.” (ibid) The Malleus Maleficarumindicates a similar thought in terms of demonic organization: “Because sin cannot change nature and the demons did not lose their gifts after the fall… and their workings on things follow the natural conditions of those things, they are various and manifold in their workings, just as they are in nature… Since they oppose the human race, when they attack it in an orderly manner they think that they cause humans more harm, as in fact they do.” (135) Since demonic activity is purely destructive, it is essentially

15 parasitic. It has no constructive blueprint for the world other than the extinction of the human species. Bonino writes: “It is a cruel irony that the diabolical society, which dreams of setting itself up as an absolutely independent anti-reality, cannot even be self-sufficient. Not only does it depend on God, who preserves it in being and utilizes the perverse organization of the demonic City for its own benevolent purposes, but it also depends, under God, on the good angels.” (282) The City of Satan then is a doomed city at the outset: it relies entirely on God since God is the source of being, and evil is merely a privation. Satan is never autonomous and ends up an instrument of God’s wrath and judgment in spite of himself. The Franciscan school of theology, along with the Dominican school of St. Thomas Aquinas, also contributed to Catholic theological ideas of demonic behavior and organization. In this school of thought, eschatology played a larger role in revealing the humility of the good Christian man, personified in St. Francis, as a counter to the demonic pride that made the angels fall at the dawn of creation. Boureau states: “...[T]his vision of Francis as the prince of angels was foretold by the im- plicit comparison between Franciscan perfection and the evil commitment of the demon on an axis of contrast that placed face to face the vow of poverty and the vow of evil, the humility of Francis and the pride of Satan. The exceptional status of Francis has also been prepared, in Franciscan tradition, by an interpretation of St. Bonaventure, who in the 1250s had seen in the presence of the angel the seventh seal of the Apocalypse an announcement of the coming of St. Francis… The human elect did not have the status of auxiliaries of the angels, since it was a human who became the prince of the angels.”(177) The hosts of fallen angels thus function like an inverted Catho- lic religious order that seeks the destruction and damnation of the human race. This is in contrast with the good Christian friars who seek to imitate the angels and save humanity through love and humility. The demon in the Franciscan vision becomes a doubly- tragic figure: not only fallen, but replaced by a humble human who presides over the entire angelic order. In this, the song of Mary in the Gospel is fulfilled: “he has knocked down the mighty from their thrones, and has exalted the humble.” (Luke 1: 52)

16 We give Bonino the last word on the commitment of demons to evil and their opposition to God: “The devil excels in scheming and conspiring—in other words, in organizing intelligently and systematically, with a view to a definite end—the consequences of men’s personal sins. He works to make the partial evils that originate in our weakness converge on the greatest possible evil. (Thus the devil apes God’s providence, which makes all things contribute to the good of those who love him.)” (289)

E. Eco-extremism as the Imitation of Satan Thomas A Kempis’ spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, has been much appreciated by clerics and laymen alike. In it, Kempis lays out the major features of Christ’s personality and actions that should be imitated by those seeking to worship him: humility, gentleness, for- titude, and above all, charity. It is Satan, the Adversary, the Accuser at the Day of Judgment, who embodies the opposite: pride, anger, cowardice, and hatred. Just like Satan, the eco-extremist and nihilist terrorist are sworn enemies of the human. They embody all of the values that modern hyper-civilized Christian man rejects (for he is Christian whether he accepts God or Jesus or not). The individualist nihilist/eco-extremist is for Chaos and Wild- ness, for those things outside of civilized control, full of demons and death. Whether he or she has a god or not, they worship the same force: Satan, the spirit of the Earth unformed and indomita- ble; they prefer the perfection of the present over the perfection of what could be. They prefer their own base desires and appetites to the perfection of improved ethical behaviors that society seeks to impose on them. And most of all, they are misanthropes: they hate humanity for what it does to the Earth and the wildness within. Humanity is neither the summit nor even a notable link in the “Great Chain of Being:” there are things higher and lower than it, if it is even appropriate to formulate things in this way. Man is thus worthy of attack if he is a threat to the common well-being of the Earth. Individualists thus perfect their means to personally attack humanity and their hatred is sharpened by the day. The eco-extremist/nihilist has no problem with authority. They have no problem belittling the human and recognizing a higher

17 force that is indifferent or hostile to humanity. As with the demonic order, that authority only exists to destroy and attack Man, and not to build anything upon the foundation of civilized society. Eco- extremists experience neither solidarity nor charity but affinity to carry out destructive action, realizing that some are better than others at tasks and proceeding accordingly. Like Satan, they know that their endeavor has failed from the outset, yet they carry on anyway. The individualist attacker may end up as a pawn in the great game of civilization, but he or she resolves that an imperfect attack that is carried out is better than a perfect yet unrealized attack. Finally, eco-extremists are proud, petty, liars, scoundrels, cowards, demented, and every other epithet that one can think of. Just as demons arguably serve at the bidding of the Christian god, so eco-extremists seem to be a product of civilization itself, reflect- ing, as if in a distorted mirror, its most disgusting pathologies. They absorb the worst of civilization to attack those who benefit from it. This love of criminality is part of the individualist modus operandi, not a deviation from it. “He was a murderer and a liar from the beginning.” Eco-extremists disguise themselves as angels of light to unleash violence under the cover of darkness as the children of the devil that they are. The eco-extremist and terrorist nihilist may be a contemporary manifestation of that Primordial Criminality of the Murderer, but they are not the first manifestation. We will go back in time to one particular episode in the Infernal Succession, where power, money, and murder merged with the demonic forces to undermine the integrity of a Christian kingdom.

Nantes 1440 ...It is probably after this setback, which the crisis followed, that Prelati, divining the need to take his master in hand, proposes what could be a last resort: the irritated demon asked Gilles for a sacrifice! It was time to sacrifice an infant to the Devil. At first this proposition seems to have left Gilles in anguish. Prelati must have known in advance that this superstitious man would tremble; he knew the reticence of the criminal who never ultimately abandoned the hope and anxiety to save his soul; Gilles could not dissemble what was improbable and repugnant in the sacrifice of an innocent, of a

18 miserable child to the ‘unclean spirit.’ However, at bay, at all costs wanting to save, as with his soul and life, what was left of his riches, he appeared one evening carrying the hand, heart, and eye perhaps, of a child. He was so eager to see the devil! During the night, the Italian presented the horrible offering, but the devil did not come… Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, pg. 55

II. The Satanic Sacrament

For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind. The Quran 5:32 According to the Catholic Catechism, a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace. That is, since God’s life and power could not possibly be bestowed upon any feeble creature, God descends toward man in the form of visible ritualistic signs in which humans can participate. Baptism, for example, takes the form of water being poured over the believer, effectively realizing the forgiveness of sins and birth into eternal life. The Eucharist—or Mass in the Roman Catholic Church—is the ceremony wherein the substance of bread and wine is transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. In eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood, the believer is united with Christ in eternal life. The visible elements of bread and wine represent the invisible grace of life everlasting. The Sacrament of the Murderer has the opposite aim: it is to show the disorderly chaos at the heart of Man, one that dissolves all order and morality. Those who believe and are grafted into the Church of the Murderer see in the spilling of blood the fulfillment of the basest desires and darkest whims. They see in the destruction of one human life the destruction of Mankind itself and the return to the Primordial Chaos. This in spite of impure or selfish intentions such as material gain, revenge, lust, and so on. Indeed, these individualistic intentions are not destroyed but perfected in the Sacrament of the Murderer, as we shall see later. From the Death of the Innocent flows the organization of the

19 Church of the Murderer, just as the early Church Fathers said that their Church flowed from Jesus’ pierced side on the Cross, out of which flowed blood and water—that is, the Eucharist and Baptism. (cf. John 19:34) Out of the shedding of the blood of the Guilty and Innocent flows the Diabolical Church, filled with individualistic violence, lies, cheating, deceit, betrayal, and disloyalty. This church lurks in the shadows of the countryside and metropolis, it seeks any place where it can strike, and takes advantage of the weak and the vulnerable for personal gain. It does so without concern for humanity, its morality and customs. A human is a tool like any other to be used to acquire what is most desired, and then thrown on the trash heap when no longer useful. This is the only way to dethrone the Human: by action and not by ideology or sentiment. We will discuss in this section the Affair of the Poisons in Louis XIV’s France. We pick this episode because it intersects with the birth of hyper-modernity, hidden criminality, and dark magic. This episode describes the underbelly of civilization where human life is cheap and disposable if personal gain is to be had by its sacrifice. This hidden criminal behavior reached near to the Throne of the Catholic King himself, with rumors of his most favored mistress participating in poisoning and ceremonies involving child sacrifice. While we cannot touch upon all of the aspects of this most complex affair, we will address episodes and personalities that are of concern to those who imitate the Murderer in the present.

A. Paris, 1677 Paris in the late seventeenth century was a growing and squalid city. The streets remained unpaved and people regularly disposed of their waste by throwing it out of their windows into the gutters below. But most significantly, there was crime. The cramped and suffocating quarters of Paris drove people to the brink of violence and im- morality, and the nights were ruled by the marginal peoples of society looking to prey on any unfortunate passerby. But even in broad daylight, the nobility was not spared violent death. The historian Holly Tucker recounts one incident of a robbery of a noble named Tardieu on St. Bartholomew’s day by the criminal Touchet brothers: “With a strength that belied his age, Tardieu lunged at the thieves, battling

20 the Touchet brothers for the gun. One of the brothers dropped the weapon and kicked it swiftly across the room. As Tardieu crouched to retrieve it, the second brother reached underneath his belt and removed a dagger. With four strokes to the neck, Tardieu crumpled to the floor.” (Tucker, p 8) This and other murders shocked Parisian society, and soon a clamor arose for the authorities to do something about urban crime and violence. In 1667, Nicolas de La Reynie was appointed the Lieutenant General of Police of the City of Paris by King Louis XIV. In the next thirty years, La Reynie would transform Paris from the dark Crime Capital of the World to the City of Light. He would head efforts to pave roads, fine people for disposing waste and dead animals in the street, and, of course, light up the streets with lanterns so that the city night was almost as luminous as the day. Not only did these efforts improve the overall standard of living of the populace, but it was hoped that such measures would diminish crime and the violent tension of people squeezed into close quarters. La Reynie’s tenure as Chief of Police was largely successful, transforming Paris into a world-renowned modern city that is still visited by tourists the world over. Nevertheless, the criminal element did not entirely disappear. On such side streets as la rue au Bout du Monde (the street at the end of the world) resided a sprawling horde of fortune tellers, thieves, abortionists, beggars, con artists, and everything else in between. There was even a rumor of a half-sunken house serving as the gateway to the Court of Miracles, a subterranean network of tunnels that spread itself throughout the city: “more than five hundred men, women, and children lived together ‘without faith and laws’ in these squalid underground caverns” (Tucker, p 25). Those in the Court of Miracles fanned out into the city everyday as “crippled” beggars and hustlers, returning at night to their den cured of their afflictions. Another resident of this neighborhood, Catherine Voisin, otherwise known as La Voisin, was a fortuneteller who features prominently in the events described below. The worlds of the paupers and of the nobility did not have an absolute partition between them. This was especially the case in the affairs of women. Even the most noble women were subject to the

21 strict rules of patriarchy in which they were essentially property to be traded with little personal agency. Even noble women had to have recourse to places like the “Street at the End of the World” to resolve the matter of a cruel spouse or an unwanted pregnancy. Often, the “wise women” who helped them (for a price) would tell the women to pray a novena to St. Ursula in the case of an abusive spouse, but to the more insistent, there was a more effective manner of resolving the issue: “Poison was primarily a woman’s weapon, most suitable to a woman’s hand. And women, it must be remembered, occupied an uncomfortable and subal- tern position, both legally and economically, in seventeenth century France. Not only the fortune of the female but her person were subject to often tyrannous paternal and conjugal authority: an errant, an uncongenial, an inconvenient wife or daughter could be shut away for life behind convent walls. It is not surprising that the majority of poisonings in that day were committed by women.” (Mossiker, 134-135) If stakes were high for women seeking to escape life imprisonment or worse, so was the paranoia around poisoning itself. Suspicion of poisoning always emerged when an unnatural or an unexpected death occurred. This came to a fever pitch in Paris in 1676, when the fugitive Marie Madeleine Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers was finally brought to justice after poisoning her father and two brothers to acquire their estates. Upon being tortured and confessing her part in the poisonings, she was beheaded and burnt at the stake. From that point forward, poison began to consume the cultural consciousness of the population of Paris, as well as of law enforcement. Priests of Notre Dame Cathe- dral even informed La Reynie that penitents were confessing the sin of poisoning at an alarming rate. (Mitford, 85) In 1677, fortune teller Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested by Paris authorities for forgery and the murder of her caretaker in order to acquire his estate. In an attempt to possibly better her situation, she convinced La Reynie that there was a network of poisoners and black magicians whose crimes reached into the upper echelons of the King’s court. Soon ladies close to King Louis XIV were overheard boasting about the ease of acquiring poisons and using them for their own ends. The King and his counselors began

22 to suspect that poisoning was a common vice among ladies of good families, including many people around the Court. A Chambre Ar- dente (Burning Chamber) was thus formed to investigate these crimes away from the gaze of the Parlement (the supreme judicial assembly), in order to prevent further scandal. The investigations by this group and its rounding up of witches, fortune tellers, and other undesirables led the authorities to a circle of the most powerful witches in Paris, headed by the aforementioned Catherine Voisin. The historian Frances Mossiker describes one arrest of a prominent figure in what would come to be known as the Affair of the Poisons: “On January 4, 1679, La Vigoureaux was arrested. Like La Bosse, along with her daughter and two sons, ‘all taken in one big bed together,’ all four snatched out and ‘embastilled.’ “The fact that the four were bedded down together—that the sorcerers’ race was traditionally perpetuated by incest; the black arts a heritage handed down from one generation to the other—was only the first of the abominations to be revealed in the course of the interrogations of this new lot of prisoners. For, if these were poisoners, abortionists, counterfeiters, as they were, they were something still more sinister: they were sorcerers—self-avowed, practicing, ninth- and tenth-generation diabolists, necromancers, witches, and warlocks.” (165)

B. La Voisin Adultera, ergo venifica (There is no adulteress who is not also a poisoner.) Cato the Elder (Mollenauer, 64)

“Men’s lives are up for sale as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practiced everywhere—in Paris, in the suburbs, and in the provinces.” Nicolas de La Reynie (ibid, 88)

Catherine Voisin, simply known as La Voisin, was a jack-of-all-trades in terms of using the dark arts to solve delicate problems. She was a fortune teller, magician, astrologer, folk healer, abortionist, and an impresario of highly questionable occult ceremonies. Coaches of the most prestigious families from all over Paris were seen parked

23 outside of her humble compound at the Street at the End of the World. From a poor upbringing, she clawed her way out of her husband’s failed jewelery business to become the Queen of the Magical Underworld. As Frances Mossiker described, Voisin would preside over her seances and magical ceremonies dressed in her “Emperor’s robe:” “a dalmatic vestment specially designed and woven for her (at the fantastic cost of 10,000 livres, as the tradesmens’ bill, attest): a skirt of lace-trimmed sea-green velvet; a cloak of crimson velvet elaborately embroidered with ‘two hundred and five doubleheaded, wing-spread eagles’: the same motif stitched in pure gold thread on her slippers.” (176) La Voisin was considered a visionary of great power and clairvoyance who claimed many in the nobility and even royalty as her clientele. La Voisin was surrounded by a large circle of poisoners, fortune- tellers, abortionists, and renegade clergy who would service the desires of anyone who could pay. Most of her business came from women of means who were unhappy with their relationships, or people who were eagerly awaiting the death of a relative to inherit a fortune. At first, La Voisin would counsel her clients to commend themselves to God or a particular saint. Soon she began to work with amulets or various potions to spur desire or bring about a desired outcome. For example, she made creams and perfumes from the powder of dried moles, roosters’ combs, and menstrual blood, which were all believed to have aphrodisiac properties. (Tucker, 29) Voisin was also known to help get rid of an unwanted spouse, for the right price: “To help a client get rid of her husband, Voisin asked for the man’s shirt. She would then bid adieu to her guest and pass the shirt to a trusted laundress, who washed it thoroughly with arsenic-based soap. (In a pinch, the man’s shoes were also an option.) Buttoning his freshly pressed chemise, the husband unwittingly sealed his own fate. The rash appeared a few hours later, followed by blisters, nausea, vomiting, and finally death… In the meantime, the family physician would diagnose the man with a pernicious case of syphilis, whose telltale sores earned the wife, his murderer, the sympathy of friends and family.” (ibid, 33) Another aspect of Voisin’s business was getting rid of unwanted pregnancies. An ex-collaborator and lover known as Le Sage, accused La Voisin of performing abortions at her compound:

24 “La Voisin’s garden pavilion, Le Sage told La Reynie, was used as an abortion parlor. There was a small oven there, in the wall, ‘concealed by a tapestry, where bones were burned if the infant body seemed too large to lay away in a garden grave.’ Margot, the maid, had warned him away from that ‘accursed oven,’ but when he had quizzed La Voisin about it, she had told him whimsically that it was for baking her ‘petits pâtés.” (Mossiker, 185) Abortions may have been good for other aspects of her business, as the young human body was thought to have rather powerful magical qualities: “In early modern Europe, both lay and learned people alike were convinced that the bodies of newborns—whether stillborn, aborted, or murdered immediately after birth—had mystical properties. Placentas were used as aph- rodisiacs when dried into a powder or a cure for infertility when eaten raw, practices the Church condemned. Tradition also had it that the fat of children was what made witches’ brooms airborne, and dried umbilical cords served as wicks in the candles that illuminated their black Sabbaths.” (Tucker, 32) Paradoxically, Voisin claimed that she baptized the aborted children prior to their deaths. In Catholic theology, this would ensure their instant salvation and eternal beatitude in the afterlife. Never- theless, one lodger at her home claimed that Voisin once boasted of having burnt the corpses of 2,500 aborted children in her oven. (ibid, 31) After being fingered by fellow witch Marie Bosse, La Voisin was arrested while leaving Mass at her Paris church in March 1679. Her home was searched but nothing incriminating was found. While in prison, accusations and counter-accusations flowed between the accused prisoners. Bosse stated that she saw Voisin hand someone diamond powder, an expensive and powerful poison, outside of Notre Dame Cathedral, a charge that Voisin vehemently denied. La Voisin did admit that, “Paris is full of this kind of thing and there is an infinite number of people engaged in this evil trade,” such as those who, “under pretext of divination or reading hands, or seeking treasure and the Philosopher’s Stone… engage in the sale of poison, abortions, and impieties…” (Somerset, 231) Accusations even began to fly of the much-rumored Black Mass and of women offering up their newborns to the devil, though La Voisin denied her participation in these ceremonies.

25 After some months in custody, La Voisin began to talk. She admitted to helping various women around Louis XIV’s court to poison their husbands, but tried to mitigate her role in these crimes as merely that of a middle woman between more culpable parties. Le Sage however also began to accuse La Voisin of forming part of the plot to poison the King through handing him a petition that had been specially prepared to poison him. In the end, La Voisin only admitted to assisting at abortions and a handful of poisonings of husbands of various ladies of the court. For the most part, Voisin defended her clientele through her silence, and La Reynie and others around the court promptly sent her to her death in a trial held in February 1680. They may have done so to keep scandalous rumors about the Court from spreading. Facing death, Voisin kept a secret “witches’ code” of protecting her clientele: “There are witches so besotted in his devilish service that neither torture nor anguish affrights them, and who say that they go to a true martyrdom and death for love of him, as gaily as to a festival of pleasure and public rejoic- ing.” (Mossiker, 218) Voisin’s last days and execution were far from a spectacle of Christian compunction and contrition. On one night after she was tortured (a customary procedure in the Ancien Regime prior to execution to get any last information out of the condemned and to remind the criminal of the gravity of the crime for which they were to be executed), she was intransigent in the face of her doomed condition: “ ...[B]roken in body as she was, she ate her supper and started up all over again on her scandalous debauches. The people around her tried to shame her, telling her that she would do better to think of God and to sing an Ave Maria… or a Salve… which she proceeded to do, but as a mockery.” (ibid) On the day of her execution, she refused to go to Confession or a priest or to kiss a Crucifix. On her way to the stake where she would be burned alive, she refused to kneel at the door of Notre Dame Cathedral, a custom for those being executed in Paris. La Voisin struggled against the executioners who tied her to the stake and piled straw over her. Her body was then consumed in a ball of flames, and one observer is recorded to have stated: “She gave her soul gently to the devil right in the middle of the fire. All she

26 did was pass from one fire to another.” (Tucker, 198) Knowledge of the full scope of La Voisin’s crimes would have been consumed with her in the flames had it not been for her daughter, Marie-Marguerite Voisin. Shortly after her mother’s death, she stepped forward and began to “unburden herself” to La Reynie. The 21-year-old revealed her mother’s extensive network within the Court and throughout Parisian society. This network would implicate the King’s favored mistress with whom he had eight children: Françoise-Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan.

C. The Secret Double-Life of the Parisian Clergy Before proceeding further through the labyrinthine intrigue of the Affair of the Poisons, an extended reflection on the role of rogue clergy in the early modern Parisian underworld is in order. Here we must remind the modern reader of the role of the Catholic clergy in the popular imagination as well as the gravity of sacrilege in a Christian sacramental context. The priest was considered to have certain magical powers since, through his ordination, he could call down the blessings of God and even the Real Presence of God Himself by his mere words and gestures. The official theological formulation for this is that the sacraments are realized ex opere op- erato, by virtue of the work worked, that is, automatically, provided that the right conditions are met. The difference between a priest and a magician was thus negligible in many circumstances: indeed, as we shall see, there was a certain symbiosis between magic and Christian sacramental practice up into the modern era. The only difference is that, while a priest might have been able to validly confect a blessing or curse in a ritual, it was not licit for him to do so outside of the authority of the Church. But as we shall see, as in any institution, illicit things could happen for the right price. One must remember that recruitment into the ranks of the clergy was often just another career option for a talented son who was not blessed with primogeniture. A second or third son might be sent off to seminary at ten years of age or younger, be ordained a priest in his early 20s, and live the rest of his life as a lonely celibate, celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and performing all sorts of other sacramental rites. To say that a good number

27 of lukewarm candidates made it into the priesthood would be an understatement: often the clergy deserved its reputation for greed and corruption, sacrilegious magic being just one extreme example. Lynn Wood Mollenauer describes the collaboration between sorcerers and priests in her book, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XVI’s France: “...[N]o sorceress or magician could stay in business very long without access to the services of a priest. The very functioning of the business of magic had a sacral dimension that required priestly cooperation..Sorceresses consequently hired priests to complete their charms. By celebrating mass over a love charm a priest activated it, just as he ‘activated’ the miracle of the mass... Magicians, too, needed priests to conduct demonic conjurations. Le Sage availed himself of the services of several clerics in addition to his regular partner, the abbe Mariette. The renegade priests were not always hired help, however. They could also act as independent agents and sell their services directly to clients.” (75-76) The types of magical ceremonies that the priest could perform ranged from passing a charm under the chalice during Mass (in which common wine was believed to transform into the blood of Christ) to reading the Gospels over someone’s head to unfailingly grant any desire. Many of the most powerful rituals were said to be contained in grimoires, or magical tomes consisting of spells written in debased ancient languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The books were used for everything from curing toothaches to conjuring demons. The most powerful spells were precisely those of necromancy, such as those contained in The Book of the Conjuration of Pope Honorius found among La Voisin’s belongings. These spells were at times the exclusive property of the Catholic priest. It was believed that since only priests could perform an exorcism as part of their sacramental powers, so only a priest could bind a demon to do the more-than-likely sinful bidding of a human being on Earth. While binding a demon might seem ominous to the modern reader, oftentimes the intentions of those who summoned the underworld were pedestrian or outright banal. Popular conjures were used to guarantee success in the game of dice or cards. Treasure hunting was also a popular occasion for summoning demons. One spell in The Book of the Conjuration of Pope Honorius aimed at “trap-

28 ping” the demon Baicher to assist in finding a treasure. This spell was performed while standing in a circle traced on the ground between midnight and 3 a.m. and reciting a conjuration that included such imprecations as: “I command you by the great living God and by the sainted Eucharist which delivers men from their sins, that without delay you come and put me in possession of the treasure that you own unjustly, without any lateness or delay… and that afterwards you leave without causing any noise, nuisance, or terror toward me or towards those who are in my company.” (ibid, 84) As with La Voisin, love magic was a best seller among women in particular. Priests could arrange for a charm to be secretly passed during Mass to a desperate woman looking for a magical means to control a husband or snag a lover, among other things. Sometimes, the rituals could go to extreme lengths of sacrilege because this was thought to bring greater benefits to the bearer of the charm. The priest Abbé Étienne Guibourg, who we shall speak about extensively below, was known to place a placenta on the altar during Mass to augment its quality as an aphrodisiac, but this was a small thing compared to one mockery of the Mass that he admitted to performing for a woman in the king’s court, Mademoiselle des Oeillets: “Wearing a priestly robe, he met Oeillets and an unknown man at Voisin’s home. He understood at the time that the man was serving as a proxy for the king, for whom the effects of the mass were intended. Holding a chalice, Guibourg instructed the couple to fill the vessel with their sexual fluids. Oeillets, who was menstruating, asked if she might make an offering of her blood instead. Guibourg agreed. The man slipped behind the bed and masturbated, ejaculating into the chalice. Then the priest stirred powder of dried bat into the semen to form a thick paste. After Guibourg blessed the concoction, he put the paste in a small dish and gave it to the couple to administer inconspicuously to the king as a love potion.” (Tucker, 211) Here I must pause for another note about modern belief. Hyper-civilized people of the 21st century feign an allergy to hypocrisy and extol purity of thought and action. Previous generations, and perhaps most people in this one, have no such allergy. La Voisin could act like a good church goer and pious reciter of novenas one moment, and in the next give a woman poison to kill her husband or throw an aborted fetus into a furnace. A member

29 of the renegade clergy of Paris went about his day like any other good priest, but he was also capable of the worst feats of sacrilege if some other benefit were to be had. Some may have done it out of outright hatred of God and his church. In the next section, we shall see that these sentiments may have played a part in the worst sacrilege conceivable: human sacrifice in the context of the shadowy Black Mass.

D. Hoc Sacrificium Laudis

...for whom we offer, or who offer up to Thee this Sacrifice of praise for themselves and all those dear to them, for the redemption of their souls and the hope of their safety and salvation: who now pay their vows to Thee, the everlasting, living and true God. From the Canon of the Mass of the Roman Catholic Church

As stated above, the death of La Voisin did not stop what has come to be known as the Affair of the Poisons, but rather accelerated investigation of it by La Reynie, due to the cooperation of the Voisin daughter. While what followed in La Reynie’s archive was story after story of sacrilege and poisoning, we will focus here on the actions of the most infamous of the Parisian renegade clergy, the aforementioned Abbé Guibourg. Along with being among the most nefarious of the participants in the Affair of the Poisons, the then septuagenarian Guibourg looked the villainous part: “No professional make-up artist of stage or screen could have surpassed Na- ture’s job on Guibourg’s face. It was that of a natural villain, eyes crossed and with purple veins that seemed about to burst, seaming his hideous, bloated face.” “A man in his seventies,” when La Reynie saw him: ‘A libertine… claiming to be the illegitimate son of the late Duc de Montmorency… having served as vicar of Issy and at Vanves, presently attached to the Paris Church of Saint Marcel… Engaged for twenty years in the traffic of poison and sacrilege… A man who has slit the throats and sacrificed countless number of infants upon his unholy altar.” (Mossiker, 230)

30 The slitting of throats of infants was the apex of what has come to be known as the Black Mass. The Mass or Eucharist as stated above is the supreme ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, said to be instituted by Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper before his death and resurrection. In the Mass, bread and wine is blessed, becoming for the believer the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man. This Bread of Heaven and Chalice of Salvation are the most sacred substances in the Catholic worldview, and they are the Body and Blood of God himself. In the Black Mass, an ordained priest confects the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ only to defile it. At least in Guibourg’s time, the sacrilegious cleric performed the ceremony over the body of a naked woman (often the beneficiary of the intentions of the ceremony), with the chalice resting on her belly or private parts. And Guibourg, to add to the sacrilege and to call up the powers of the Underworld for the petition of the naked woman serving as the altar, would then sacrifice an infant and pour its blood into the chalice, satiating the thirst of the fallen angels for violent human death. (Cf. The Malleus Maleficarum.) Sometimes the priest would then have carnal intercourse with his “altar,” thus sealing the bloody sacrilege. Due to the sexualized nature of the ceremony, the historian Lynn Wood Mollenaur terms this ceremony, “the amatory Mass,” as the intention was often to gain the affections of a very important male such as the King himself. The power of the defiled body and blood of God would enter the woman/altar, making her irresistible to the man of her affection. Guibourg was not beyond sacrificing his own “body and blood” to heap sin upon sin as Paris’s diabolical high priest. Despite his appearance, he had numerous mistresses throughout his clerical career, and fathered many children. Numerous accounts of his former lovers stated that he had a knack for making the issue from his dal- liances disappear, sometimes with the cooperation of the mother (throwing the newborns into a river, for example), and sometimes without her consent at all. Guibourg had fathered a child with a prostitute named Jeanne Chanfrain, and upon its birth Guibourg whisked the child away claiming that he was going to place it with a good family. Some days later, the mother went in search of the

31 child, only to be told that the child had died but no one told her where it was buried. When Chanfrain confronted Guibourg with the accusation, “You killed my child!” Guibourg’s only retort was, “It is none of your business.”(Tucker, 214) La Reynie was convinced that Guibourg had offered some of his own children to Satan. Guibourg may have continued his murderous career in the shadows had he not been accused of being a member of La Voisin’s corps of clerics that she called upon to perform sacrilegious services. When accused by the Voisin daughter of performing the Black Mass over the King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, Guibourg said that he was taken advantage of “in his weakness” and had indeed performed the blasphemous ceremonies. He claimed that he never saw the face of the particular woman in question because it was veiled. Guibourg added details such as the use of candles made of “new yellow wax and the fat of a hanged man,”(Mollenauer, 107) as well as the invocation used for Madame de Montespan in particular: “Astaroth, Asmodee, princes of love, I conjure you to accept the sacrifice of this infant that I present to you for the things that I ask, which are that the love of the king and the dauphin continues, to be honored by the princes and princesses of the court, and that nothing will be denied to me of all that I will ask of the king, my relatives, and followers” (Tucker, 203) At this invocation, Guibourg raised a penknife and slit the throat of the newborn who had been brought for that purpose, then poured the blood into the chalice. The priest then butchered the newborn to make charms out of its body parts for the benefit of Madame de Montespan. Though the hardened police chief La Reynie was somewhat incredulous at the tale of Black Masses, his journal records the following observation: “Impossible for a man of Guibourg’s mentality to have invented a story of the pact in such detail… His mind is simply incapable of manufacturing such a story, following through on it, sticking with it. Nor is he in the position to know that much about the world in which Mme de Montespan lives. Furthermore, his memory is such that he simply could not have retained, over all these years, so many of the words of the supposed pact… unless he had seen and read and recited some sort of a similar conjuration, many times over.”(Mossiker, 236)

32 Later historians believe that La Reynie may have been too gullible (cf. Mitford, 92), or that the stories of those accusing Ma- dame de Montespan of being involved in these acts were not as air-tight as La Reynie believed at the time (cf. Somerset, 326) If the accusers thought that their macabre stories would save them, they were sadly mistaken. As the accusations around the King’s favored mistress piled up (including an accusation that she paid La Voisin to deliver a poisoned petition to the King on the day of her arrest), La Reynie felt that the only way to halt the proceedings was to issue a lettre de cachet, effectively ending the investigation against the accusers but directing their indefinite detention. For those like Guibourg who would never see a trial, that entailed being chained to the wall in a dungeon in a far-away prison until death. All told, the results of the Chambre Ardente during the Affair of the Poi- sons were: “thirty-six burnt to death after torture; four sent to the gal- leys; thirty-six banished or fined (mostly gentlefolk) and thirty acquitted.” (Mitford, 91) Eighty-one, including Guibourg, “benefitted” from the lettre de cachet, though their jailers were told to show them no mercy or kindness. It is believed that most died within a few years of their captivity. The Chambre Ardente itself was closed in 1682, thus effectively ending the Affair of the Poisons. The whole affair would have been shrouded in mystery had La Reynie, an obsessive record keeper, not duplicated most of his records, since the Sun King supposedly burned all of La Reynie’s papers pertaining to the matter upon his death in 1709. More than a matter of State, the Affair of the Poisons was also a turning point within the spiritual consciousness of early modern France. Louis XIV’s Edict of 1682 that ended the affair not only regulated the sale and use of poisons, but also forbade “all practices and acts of magic or superstition, in word or speech, either profaning the text of Holy Writ or the Liturgy, or saying or doing things that cannot be explained naturally.” (Mollenauer, 149) On the cusp of the En- lightenment, even the Catholic Monarch of the Eldest Daughter of the Church felt it necessary to “clean up” the spiritual side of his kingdom. Though the criminal magical underworld was never abolished, and would see a revival of sorts during the Romantic era

33 of the 19th century, the Affair of the Poisons was still a noticeable milestone in the March of Humanist Progress. Whether or not all of the testimonies of Guibourg, the Voisin daughter, et al, were true cannot be known with certainty. Crimi- nals by nature are not honest people, and murder and lying often go hand in hand. However, poisoning did occur, sacrilegious services were known to take place before and after the Affair of the Poisons, and infant sacrifice is mentioned too many times in history to be dismissed as an urban legend. Even the historian Anne Somerset, who is otherwise skeptical of the claims of the Black Mass, admits that the life of infants was relatively cheap in 17th century Paris, and the material means to perform the ceremony were not lacking (326). Multiple priests were accused of performing this ceremony around the Affair of the Poisons, not just Guibourg. Sensationalism and urban legend will play a role in our next section, where we move on from the Damnation history of the Murderer in the past to his workings in the present.

Matamoros 1989 ...Yes, the sacrifice has been made as the ancient laws required: cigar smoke and rum to summon the seven powers, the headless turtle, the head of a goat, blood from a rooster. And, of course, a human life ended now, a man raped, battered, and sliced, his heart torn beating from his chest, his blood still draining into a clay pot… Except he had not screamed. And that was the problem. It was important for the offering to die in confusion and pain, and most of all, in fear. A soul taken in violence and terror could be captured and used by the priest, turned into a powerful, angry servant that would wreak revenge on the priest’s enemies... But this time, they have chosen a hard man—a drug dealer, a man who practiced his own sort of violence. He had stubbornly refused to lose control; he simply gritted his teeth, his eyes steely. And even after those eyes had filmed over in pain, even after the priest had covered them with tape to bring the terror of blindness, still the man refused to scream. In the end, the priest was the one who cried out, shrieking in frustration at the man who died in silence, even after the priest began skinning

34 him alive. No, the gods would not be pleased with this one. Nor could this soul be bent to the priest’s will. He had lost—for the first time ever he had lost. Some dark tide had turned, he imagined, and the ground was slipping loose beneath him. He could feel it… “Bring me someone I can use,” Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo told his flock. “Someone who will scream.” Edward Humes, Buried Secrets: A True Story of Serial Murder, Black Magic, and Drug Running on the U.S. Border, pages 1-2

III. Bomb, Bullet, and Blade

We are not sorry for anything, there is not a single drop of remorse or regret that accompanies us in the life we choose to live, we face life and death and we will continue like this, crossing the limits of what is allowed, advancing beyond the point of no return. 42nd Communique of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild

...ea quae sunt ex nihilo, quantum est de se in nihilum tendunt; et sic omnibus creaturis inest potentia ad non esse… (“...whatever is from nothing of itself tends toward nothing, so that in all creatures there is the power not to be…”) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles

In the final section, we will discuss eco-extremism as one of the most recent incarnations of the Murderer in the contemporary world. Eco-extremism is not an alternative to humanist ideals and morality, but rather their defiling in the name of the Nameless and Wild Nature. The only united dogma among eco-extremists and terrorist nihilists is the Death of Man as an attack on He-Who-Is. This is an inversion of means and ends, for the violent individualist only seeks to cause harm to his or her enemy, and nothing more. They see this as activity that is both deeply spiritual and personally satisfying, though it may require hardship on their part. The death 35 of the hyper-civilized is the sacred offering to the Unknowable that defiles the religion of Humanity.

A. Mexico City, 2016 Late last decade, a group of young people in central Mexico began to commit themselves to a life of direct action and anonymous activism. They formed independent cells of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF), devoting themselves to such actions as vandalizing research laboratories and free- ing animals from their cages. Under the influence of insurrectionary anarchism and the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, they began to move away from militant animal rights and vegan ideologies, and develop an ideology where violent confrontation is primary. In 2011, they formed the Individualities (later “Individualists”) Tend- ing Toward the Wild (Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje— ITS) as a sort of “heretical” anarchist sect that still shared some humanist values, though with an emphasis on a violent defeatism. Their actions imitated those of Freedom Club in the 1970s and ‘80s, with package bombs sent to various centers of techno-industrial progress throughout Mexico, along with the execution of a bio- technologist in 2011. Over the years, two tendencies began to re-shape the ideology of this group of individualists. One is a descent into criminality; in order to make ends meet, they had to live by their wits in the criminal underworld of metropolitan Mexico City and Mexico State. Thus, they put away their initial altruism in order to live a life of illegality. On the other hand, some members underwent a “spiritual transformation,” perhaps in walkabouts in the last wild places of Mexico. They began a deep study of Mexican history (as far as they were able), some returning to their family roots in the not-so-distant past to reveal the little-appreciated resistance of their ancestors to civilization, in both its Western and Mesoameri- can forms. They broke their last ties to scientific humanist thought, and changed their name to Wild Reaction in 2014. After a year, Wild Reaction broke apart, but not for long. By January 2016, those with affinity to their criminal savage ideology could be found in a few countries in the Americas and beyond,

36 as well as in a shadowy faction in Europe. In late May 2016, they claimed responsibility for their second murder: the stabbing of the Head of Services of the Chemistry Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Their communique taking responsibility for the action opened with these words: “We were on the hunt, and last night we turned into wolves. Our thirst for blood was satisfied for a moment, while the demons of our ancestors took possession of our minds and bodies.” No longer militant members of the rational left, ITS had become something completely different. Like the poisoners of 16th century Paris, ITS has its own “cowardly” manner of harming the hyper-civilized: the bomb. Poison is far from an accurate or sure way of taking someone’s life, and many could and did suffer as collateral damage in attempts to poison an intended target. Like their predecessors, individualists go forward with their indiscriminate actions regardless of who might “get in the way.” Their methods and actions are clandestine and there is uncertainty as to whether the group even exists, just as the existence of a vast network of poisoners and renegade priests was the object of doubt for some in early modern Paris. In their pursuits, the eco-extremists emphasize the necessity of the double life. Gone are the days when one lives without hypocrisy and according to principles. Misanthropic individualists live by the Great Lie—they are just ordinary people trying to get through life like anyone else, when in reality they have long ago sold their souls to the Devil. They keep the bloodlust against the hyper-civilized in their heart of hearts, just as Abbé Guibourg hid his pacts with Satan behind the clerical habit and vestments, or La Voisin hid her penchant for poisoning behind her murmuring into rosary beads. The double life is an added mockery to the hyper-civilized before their blood is spilled upon the Earth. Just as La Reynie and King Louis XIV were fighting against the magical underworld of their time, so the eco-extremists—often ex-atheists or ex-rationalists—are seeking to restore a traditional metaphysical worldview against the secularized Christianity that dominates our time. They curse their enemies and perform rituals before their actions, they commend themselves to spirits, and

37 openly attack the church and people within it. They take up the belief in the realm of spirits since their hatred of society drives them to regress into the past, toward the spirits of the Earth who dominated before Christian Man began his war against them. The eco-extremist is the revenge of the silenced spirits, the spittle in the eye of the Nazarene. Finally, the eco-extremists regard their victims as a sacrifice to the misanthropic spirits of the Earth. Like the homicidal priests who performed Black Masses in seventeenth century France, they know that the demons of the Earth thirst for the blood of the hyper-civilized. While sacrilege is in some ways no longer possible due to society’s general secularization, the last sacred object that one can defile is human life itself. The war against civilization is a war against Man, full stop. In this war, the shedding of human blood is the only victory, it is the only way to appease the suppressed spirits of the ancestors. Eco-extremists and terrorist nihilists (whether believers or not) aim to offer this blood through selective and indiscriminate attack in an effort to slay human supremacy. Individualist terrorism is not merely a-political or a-moral, but a parody of the political, the moral, and the strategic, just as the Black Mass was a parody of the most sacred Catholic rite. Though an action might imitate what anarchists or other anti-authoritarians may have done in past times, the intentions and methods are radically different: more violent, less selective, more chaotic. The shedding of blood is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself. Many contemporary anarchist actions are figurative (a bomb placed in the middle of the night on an empty street, outside the door of an empty church, etc.), thus being a “clean oblation” (Mal- achi 1:11) on the Altar of Anarchist Values. This is in parallel with the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Christian Church that is manifest in bread and wine only. Individualist action is far more literal, defiling the Altar of Humanist Solidarity with actual blood and suffering. Indiscriminate attack is the profanation of political action. It’s not merely an issue of political confrontation, but of sacrilege. Thus, like the war in Heaven between demons and angels, the individualist war may seem futile or absurd as the outcome has long

38 ago been determined. Individualists might even been seen as pawns fighting on behalf of societal forces of reaction or fascism, just as demons seem to do the will of God in spite of their own intentions. This is of no concern to the individualist: he or she would hate Mankind equally whether found in an anarchist paradise or a fascist police state. Humanity is what destroys Wild Nature in our context. Humanity, with its morality and belief in human supremacy, is what subjugates the Wild Nature within. Even though individual lone wolves could never eradicate humanity by themselves, or even make a significant dent in the number of humans, they can con- form themselves to the war that Wild Nature is waging against the human through “natural disasters,” entropy, and criminality. Eco- extremist individualist action is “sacramental” because it points to something greater than itself, and greater than the human. In being a shadowy menace, it grafts itself into the forces that are waging war against the Human in the present.

B. Gratia Non Tollit Naturam Sed Perficit (Grace does not destroy nature but rather perfects it) Eco-extremist violence is not superior to political or criminal violence. It doesn’t pretend to be more effective or meaningful. Individualists understand all forms of criminality, including robberies, murders, fraud, and all sorts of anti-social manifestations, as activities that “flawed” and carried out by selfish human beings. Moreover, they appreciate the tactical and organizational genius of such unsavory groups as the Islamic State, MS-13, Italian mafiosi, serial killers, etc. In spite of the varying intentions of these past and present groups, individualists see them within the continuum of the Murderer’s war against the Human. Anything that attacks the political and social fabric of the techno-industrial civilization has something to teach the individualist, even if at times the Unknow- able writes straight with crooked lines. Similar to the Christian seeing God’s Providence in the everyday workings of society, the spiritual individualist sees the power of the Unknowable in common criminal refusal and in the natural disaster. Their aim is not to usurp the actions of others or to belittle the original selfish intention of the criminal, but the acknowledg-

39 ment of the violence at the heart of hyper-civilized existence. The eco-extremist believes that the Human is a means to an end like anything else. The believing individualist sees the handprint of the Unknowable and the Murderer in every action that attacks the Hu- man. He does not sit in his retreat far from civilization searching for an authentic sign from the Ineffable, but sees Wild Nature and the Unknowable hiding in the shadows and moving through the cracks of this putrid society. Most of all, he or she is patient, observant, and ever-vigilant for the right time to strike. For the eco-extremist, this is another important aspect of the sacred: not merely contemplation or living apart in peace, but attack itself. The individualist does not see himself or herself as superior to what they are attacking. They know full well that they are part of the problem. They know full well that they are just as hyper-civilized as anyone else. What gives them license to attack their fellow hyper-civilized is not some inner light or some special virtue that no one else has. It is the misanthropic “grace” of the Unknowable that sets them apart, not in any sense of being “chosen,” but only in the sense of giving them an insight that makes them strange, defective, and freakish compared to their peers. They are monsters in the original sense: deformations of domesticated nature, duds that the factory line worker should have put in the trash bin, those who perhaps should have been strangled in their cradles. This might be due to social malformation or emotional instability: it doesn’t really matter now. Even if the eco-extremist is the product of the worst of civilization, they are now indistinguishable from the general population, and they only seek one thing: the death of the civilized. Eco-extremism is thus just as pitiful and demented as people make it out to be: a bunch of kids with bombs and guns who were rejected by society first (or so people think); teenagers who never fit in and decided to carry out anti-social attacks because of it. And, what critics say is true: in the long run, modern techno-industrial civilization is far more effective at killing and terrorizing individual humans than individualists/eco-extremists ever could be. Civiliza- tion has the means, the organization, and the lack of consideration for most (human) life to do real ecocidal damage. And yet, the lone individualist continues to be a concern due to what he or

40 she represents: the solitary threat of the lone wolf who can throw a wrench into the machine, even if the machine quickly fixes itself. That hiccup in the narrative points to the ultimate victory of the Unknowable over civilized plans and morality. In the view of the hyper-civilized, eco-extremism means nothing. It is just an insignificant group of psychopaths carrying out petty if demented acts of violence from sheer frustration. The reason people fear it is because eco-extremists have ceased to see anything they do from the human perspective; they view the Hu- man as foolish and repugnant ipso facto. They may seek attention as humans seek recognition from other humans, but in the end, a lack of recognition will not stop them. Eco-extremist murder and maiming are not politically or so- cietally significant; they are “sacramental” for each individualist: a part of their intimate relationship with the Unknowable at the ex- pense of the hyper-civilized. They are a sign of hope pointing to the destruction of the Human: to the moment when the Human will be erased from the Land of the Living, and when He-Who-Is, Yahweh, the Crucified, Human Power as its own end, the Spirit of Progress, etc. will finally be bound again with the Chains of Chaos and Forgetfulness.

C. Doxology But alas! You barbarous men, you, cruel monsters, you, vulgar profaners, you—who knew so well how dear to me were these shade trees, you coward and heartless violators of the right of property, ye invaded, during my absence; ye felded with the ax this sacred grove… ye have in a fit of madness dared achieve the sacrilegious deed of irreparable devastation, covering my dear Nook with a desolating heap of mouldering trunks and leafless boughs...

To the Murderer, the Adversary, the Accuser at the Day of Judg- ment, be all praise, honor, and worship! May the blood of the hyper-civilized flow from his blade, may the echo of their lamenta- tions be heard for all eternity! May mountains rise up over their cities, may their homes be flooded by the waters, may their bones be blown away by the wind! Our god is a god of war who pierced the Christian conquerors

41 with his arrows and smashed their children against a stone! Our god ground their temples into rubble and returned their treasures to the Earth! This is the work of the Unknowable, and it is marvel- ous in our eyes! To the Unknowable, the Nameless, the Wild God of the World, be all glory and dominion, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages!

Adrien Rouquette The Nook The Feast of All Saints, 2017

42 Works Cited Bonino, Serge-Thomas. Angels and Demons: A Catholic Introduction. Washing- ton D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2016 Boreau, Alain. Satan the Heretic: the Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Constantelos, Demetrios J. “The Lover of Mankind.” http://www.theway.org.uk/ Back/092Constantelos.pdf Feser, Edward. “Cartesian Angelism”. http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/07/ cartesian-angelism.html Holy Quran. http://www.clearquran.com/007.html Institoris, Heinrich. The hammer of witches: a complete translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Christopher S. Mackay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ishill, Joseph. “Elisée Reclus' Optimism.” http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_ Archives/bRIGHT/reclus/ishill/ishill143-149.html John Paul II. Redemptor Hominis. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/ en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis. html Kazlev, M. Alan. “Teilhard de Chardin's Evolutionary Philosophy.” Kheper. http://www.kheper.net/topics/Teilhard/Teilhard-evolution.htm Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Maritain, Jacques. Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929. Mirandolla, Pico della. Oration on the Dignity of Man. http://bactra.org/Mi- randola/ Mitford, Nancy. The Sun King. New York: Penguin Books, 1994 Mossiker, Frances. The Affair of the Poisons: Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan, and One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Mollenauer, Lynn Wood. Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XVI’s France. Pennsylvannia University Press, 2007. Ouspensky, Leonid. The Theology of the Icon. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Semi- nary Press, 1978. Penzin, Alexei. “Contingency and Necessity in Evald Ilyenkov’s Com- munist Cosmology.” https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/ veranstaltung/p_135481.php

43 Pieper, Josef. The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays. South Bend: St. Augus- tine’s Press, 1999. Parente, Pascal P. The Angels: The Catholic Teaching on the Angels. Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers Inc., 1994. Ripperger, Chad. “Generational Spirits”. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mpJgVAs02Dc Rituale Romanum. http://www.sanctamissa.org/en/resources/books-1962/ rituale-romanum/09-baptism-of-children.html Somerset, Anne. The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004 Thomas Aquinas. On Evil. Translated by Richard Regan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Con- traGentiles.htm Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1050. htm Tucker, Holly. City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

44 45 Some reflections on modern human action from the eco-extremist perspective

46 Brief introduction: I started drafting this text at the beginning of February and I planned to publish it before, but one question or another halted its drafting and thus led to a brief delay. Even so, we saw an opportunity for it to be published in Regresión Magazine No. 7. At the beginning of the text one will read of various events that occurred in Mexico, others specifically in the Laguna Region. The reader can look into these events to get further clarity on the context. The theme that I address in this text is more complex and we know that it needs to be developed more than this, but at least I was able to organize a bunch of ideas swirling about in my head in this hurried text composed in sleepless nights.

From the epicenter of the crisis: The citizenry continues in their unrest due to the hike in the price of gasoline. Of late in the Laguna Region leftist organizations of no more than twenty people have illusions and are excited about the “people waking up.” Just another illusion, another revolution that never will arrive. We’re only a few hours away from when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks here in Torreon, the beloved leader of many leftists who I find ridiculous. He will speak of hope, of course, and of the path on which he finds himself—namely toward a future where he and his party take power. We feel so distant from those good-hearted people who cry from emotion at the hopeful words of their leader, or who await another showing of social discontent to be able to march and feel themselves all the closer to the dreamed-of revolution. For them we have only total disgust and disdainful laughter. Recent events have shaken the country, from the rioting in many parts, a shootout at a high school in Monterrey, and even an attempted suicide in a school in Torreon. All of these have the citizenry and the good-hearted leftists upset and indignant. We don’t feel empathy for any of these so-called tragic occurrences since we see all within this civilization rotting. At the end of the day, the progress that they promise us is neither ideal nor pretty. Today the wild wind made us think of Cachiripa manifesting himself in among the savage Irritilas, even if it was a strong wind that embraced us in melancholy. We know that this manifestation

47 will never return. Man, having become totally dependent on technology, has lost his natural quality, becoming artificial and accepting his condition with joy and excitement. The hyper-civilized go about with giddy anticipation for the ideal technological future. Today the wind that whipped the city was tainted with industrial waste that poisons the air, which smelled only of progress and out- of-control urban sprawl. Regression is impossible; we do not seek a return to the Stone Age. That would make us just another group of deluded people. For us, humans deserve to disappear. This is what motivates us to write today, since we do not know if other people are incapable of doing a fair analytical reading of eco-extremism, or maybe we’re just really bad writers. I state this since it seems that this confounds many pseudo-critics who “study” and “explain” the communiques and acts that we carry out. The recurring question among those critics include: “What do those crazy people want?” Or on other occasions they come up with some rather fantastic explanations about who those eco-terrorist groups are, without forgetting the most recurrent error: classifying us as still being anarchists even though every communique that a particular group issues makes it clear that the eco-extremists/terrorists are NOT anarchists. Some anarchists still look for radical change in human relations, to pass from a hierarchical to a horizontal mode of life where no one rules over anyone else. We eco-extremists do not seek a change in human relations; to us the human is disgusting. If the worker is exploited or the price of public transportation is raised, we do not care in the least. This is something that so-called intellectuals don’t quite capture when they speak about eco-extremism, namely, that our war is not for the human, but, on the contrary, we are the antithesis of the human. It is for this reason that we stay far away from all struggles and ideologies that seek to contribute something positive to the human and all that is entailed by it. This in spite of any contradiction that our condition represents. We aren’t good-hearted people. We even reject the concept of being “good.” Why is that? Because some time ago we stopped trying to find motives to fight for the development and well-being of humanity. As we stated previously, some analysts have tried to deci-

48 pher the thought of the eco-extremists, without being able to take off the glasses of anthropocentrism when they express conjectures concerning eco-extremism. What we are saying here is that they seek to give a human meaning to the actions of the tendency. When an attack is carried out by an eco-extremist group, the questioning is along the lines of: What do these groups want? And in a rather horrific fashion they have even come to say on some newscasts that eco-extremist attacks “demand” the liberation of some prisoners linked to the anarchist movement. The media keeps lying and showing their ignorance every time they mention us. Neither the mainstream nor the alternative media are exempt from this error. But what can one expect of those great wise people or intellectuals? What can one expect when those who live to achieve goals come into contact with those who have neither goals nor dreams, who do not expect anything from their actions—not even victory—because they know that they have already lost? People who shout, “We haven’t lost yet!” have ceased to make sense in our eyes. In reality all is lost, but for the intellectuals who speak and speak about us and our actions, who contribute humanist, moral, and anthropocentric feelings characteristic of the Western cosmo- vision, everything is as it should be or at the very least is geared toward full human development. They say all of that without questioning what it even means. The word “freedom” forms part of that humanist thinking, but what does it mean to declare oneself free? Today free is a synonym for consumer choice, access to a better place to get drunk after a hard week of work, to tourist attractions, the ability to start a family, and endless options for the free will of the civilized. As we can see, the free person is inexorably linked to commerce, consumption, and the life of the market. The human is the animal who takes the longest to become capable of surviving on its own. He arrives in this world defense- less and requires years of learning within a family to become autonomous. This aspect of human life is not merely arbitrary, as it took humans thousands if not millions of years to accumulate the knowledge needed to survive. In antiquity, the tribe taught young people basic knowledge for survival, so that they would have the

49 capacity to confront their hostile natural environment. Now, the long time it takes for an infant to mature remains, but it manifests itself in a different manner. In the first phase of childhood within the family, the young human is indoctrinated in the mode of life posited by modern techno-industrial society. In this text we will focus on one aspect that the family, the school, society, and diverse media have undertaken to construct in our thinking when we begin to become aware of our existence. Perhaps this will give an explanation why ridiculous analysts can never understand eco-extremists, since they as well as everyone else were educated under the schema imposed by techno-industry. The contexts in which people relate to one another and develop in modern society are many and varied. This is particularly the case in Mexico when one only need to take into consideration how the location of various residential zones determines their purchasing power, the institutions where they receive their formation, and the places where they develop. Aspirations are another polymorphic aspect. In civilization the relationship with others is also determined by context and this is reflected in language. For example, even if we all speak Spanish in this country, we encounter regional variations even within the same city, from what experience and language bring to the speaker’s perspective. This is, then, the basis for thought. But, in terms of aspirations, even if different, it is something that the inhabitants of these distinct contexts share, that is to say, each member of modern society possesses an aspiration, a goal that they should accomplish. For what? For the banal, to achieve success, which we will further develop below. From youth we are educated to achieve. We are exhorted to stand out in this market-driven world. Everyone wants to “excel,” even though there are diverse concepts and forms for this. All depends on the context in which one wants to succeed. The price of doing so however is the same: frustration. The mind of the modern human revolves around being able to achieve goals, no matter how superficial. The family indoctrinates children for this, it prepares us in civilized subjects to allow us to focus on goals, even though at first these might be ill-defined. Once we have acquired behavioral social norms, school and society come in to better define those

50 goals and objectives as the years pass. The media gives us the coup de grace, especially through personal electronic devices to which even the youngest have access. These offer us the design to which our goals and aspirations must mold themselves. But how does one achieve them? It doesn’t matter, the point is to make it to the top, or to fool yourself by looking like it. The goals of each human are not innate, they are not substan- tive. Nor do humans come complete with desires from before their birth. These are all determined by their social context. Thus, a person from a marginal neighborhood will not have the same goals as someone from a more wealthy and affluent neighborhood. What this modern society shares is the desire to obtain social recognition. Modern humans act to be recognized by their social circle, and this goes for the most superficial person up to the most leftist revolutionary. Wanting to be recognized, to be praised and applauded for accomplishing a goal is a part of human functioning, or better said, the functioning of the hyper-civilized who inhabits modern techno-industrial society. There are those who dream of becoming entrepreneurs, and this is not surprising as the ideal of driven young people and the entrepreneurial lifestyle is an imposed trope onto modern life from all of the media. One only need look at the type of education that the majority of private schools impart, for example the Techno- logical Institute of Superior Studies of Monterrey (ITESM). This institution encourages entrepreneurship in its young students so that they can become successful people devoted to commercial and human progress. But not all modern humans have the goal of starting a business. Some want to finish their studies so that they can “become someone” in life, to devote themselves to a good-paying job and enslave themselves to boredom in some company, all with the goal of earn- ing money. It’s common to hear someone state that they are going to major in one thing or another because, “that’s where the money is.” But the pretentious desire to accomplish some goal, sometimes called life goals, is based on getting drunk, partying every night, and being the most popular. Do these people have any actual goals? Many times they’re only working to fund their vice or in some cas-

51 es they don’t even work. Many will say that these latter people are breaking with social mores imposed by society, or that they are the proof that not all live their lives striving toward some goal or another. It’s also funny that some think of themselves as rebels against modern society since they base their entire lives on doing both legal and illegal drugs. Unfortunately for these types who think themselves to be social outcasts or great rebels, their consumption and fun is just another act imposed by modern society. The accumulation of capital, economic well-being, a diploma, drinking and clubbing are goals that are achieved, but, true satisfac- tion comes from social recognition. We should keep in mind that every goal is determined by its social context. That is to say, it is born out of social coexistence, and so it is a social product. Thus, modern techno-industrial society, which is present even in the most minimal actions of its inhabitants, determines the goals that all hyper-civilized wish to achieve. In other words, social relations are conditioned by modern society. But the recognition of every achievement is not the same in every context. There are distinct goals that have to be achieved by a wealthy family as opposed to those in a gang, or in a group of friends at a party. It is for this reason that the overarching element is that one achieves one’s goals in the context in which one lives as a human disposed to achieve them. Social recognition is bestowed according to social context. What for one social context would be a cause of shame for another might be praiseworthy. Here is where all analysis and reasoning of “intellectual experts” finds itself in a labyrinth in which there are many false ways out in explaining the discourse and actions of eco-extremists. What can you expect from those who live to achieve goals set for them by social recognition? What are these people to think when they come up against those who have no desire for social recognition? We eco-extremists don’t expect that anyone will praise us for what we do, nor that we will be admired or that we will be recognized by civilization. On the contrary, from civilization and its blind ad- vocates all we expect is disgust. That is why “analysts” don’t find any motives guided by the Goddess Reason. For it is reasonable to have an end, a goal that one wants to achieve. Their hypotheses are

52 wrecked when they realize that there are indeed some people who have no real goals in life, since we eco-extremists don’t strive for anything above our own acts, nor do we fool ourselves into thinking that our end, or better yet, our goal, is to destroy civilization. We know that this is not possible. “Enough of wishes!” we shout to the deluded dreamers. “Enough with dreams!” we cry to those who sleep in this ephemeral existence. “Enough with tomorrows!” we thunder to those who fear the present. There will be many criticisms of this text, we will address one beforehand since they will say to us: Why do the eco-extremists issue so many communiques and reflections if they do not seek any particular goal, or anything above their own action? Eco-extremists are at war, and thus propaganda and reflection are tools that we seek to use to position ourselves within the debacle. Tactics such as the “war on the nerves” are utilized by the eco-extremists, from the sharp criticism to the destructive bomb. Let them keep on about their world of desires and dreams, we will keep dancing in hell! Ozomatli, Huehuecoyotl in Torreón, March 2017

53 A New Revolutionary Phraseology

54 The phenomenon of leftism in Mexico has been revived after a brief hiatus when the indignant masses marched in the streets for the Ayotzinapa case, as well as for the murders in Nochixtlan during the protests led by the teachers (principally by the National Coordinating Committee of Workers in Education [CNTE]). After four months of rebellion and revolutionary hope, the fire was put out. The forty three students became objects of ridicule, and were submerged in general forgetfulness, as were the dead of Nochixtlan. Once more the revolution, the much awaited change for a “better Mexico,” didn’t arrive. Months afterward it would seem that the enthusiasm returned, this time not headed by radical students or teachers. Now those who waved the flag of the vanguard were those sanctified emissaries, the militants of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), and of course the beloved prophet Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. It should be pointed out that these beings of noble heart and their sacred party have become a force in Coahuila. And because the elections here are just around the corner, the noble militants have done everything possible to get out the vote, to gen- erate a new ideology in what they call “the people.” They assure us that this new ideology will be more critical, less submissive, and “more revolutionary.” Let me express the purpose of this text. It is once more a criticism against leftists, their struggles and hopes, as well as a description of their efforts in relation to social networks, and the false hope of revolution. My starting point is a term presented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1845-1846), “supposedly-revolutionary phraseology.” Why did I choose these three categories? I believe that there is a close relationship between them. An attempt to analyze eacho one separately would not make much sense, nor would it lead anywhere. Thus, for a more effective criticism, I critique them in conjunction, and will try to describe common threads to advance analysis. I should admit that these are not the only categories by which one can devise an accurate criticism of leftism and its en-

55 lightened militants. When I refer to leftism, I mean Mexican leftism of the present day. Leftism in other parts of the world is beyond the scope of this essay, which is not to say that there are not influential reciprocities between Mexican and international leftism.

Leftism and Social Networks: The Great Revolution Political demonstrations are seen from time to time on Mexican streets, often on dates that are “symbolically combative.” Some- times these demonstrations turn violent and become street revolts where people throw rocks, police set things on fire, windows are broken, barricades are formed, there are Molotov cocktails, a mob running about, people arrested, other people with their heads split open, and a myriad of leftists shouting at the top of their lungs for peace and calm. Leftists are always inclined to accuse others of being provocateurs, infiltrators, government agents,1 petit-bourgeois (this one is primarily from Marxist groups), counter-revolutionaries, and the list goes on. It would not be accurate to say that only anarchists participate in the disturbances, since common people do as well, as we saw in the riots and looting that took place around the “gasolinazo.” Eco- extremists also decided to infiltrate the mob and push it forward in the midst of the debacle. In any case, whoever stirs up the violence in what is supposed to be a peaceful demonstration will be pointed out and condemned by the leftists. There is no room for those who do not respect the revolutionary schemas and processes! This is what the leftist would shout with a frown and a fist in the air. How quaint. The revolution is a light breeze that they wait for in hell.They bind themselves to it so capriciously, but what do they actually do to bring it about? Will they be ready to kill any unfortunate soul who gets in the way of achieving their ideal society? Or do they not kill in revolutions? They desire the revolution with all of their might, they dream of changing the country without firing a shot, or without the need to execute people. Their revolution rests on the illusion that people will change and dedicate themselves to the path of general welfare and will do so primarily by voting for the sanctified party, the savior and liberator of humanity. Revolution is

56 so beautiful in the realm of ideas! Regrettably for these noble beings, their enemy is the State, and yes, they condemn it as the “Murderous State!”, which is indeed the case. That is to say, the state has an armed security force that it would not hesitate, as shown in the past, to use against anyone who opposes them. It does not matter if that subversive is armed or not. In spite of this, the delusional leftist sees the possibility of change by the electoral route, though the system is controlled by the regime. But does the revolutionary really want revolution? Would these noble men and women be ready to kill or die for the cause? What does the “grand revolutionary” lover of the people really want? I have some ideas concerning the last question. To begin an- swering it, one should observe the activity of those militants of the left on social networks (mainly Facebook and Twitter.) The question arises as to what role these social networks play in the struggles of the left. These networks end up being the repository for complaints, protests, aspirations, and demonstrations of knowledge that usually develop into lively debates in which one demonstrates an intellectual understanding superior to one’s interlocutors. Thus, within social networks the militant leftist achieves a form of catharsis. The networks become “safe spaces” that protect him or her from the world that doesn’t change. Not only are they a repository for his or her commentaries, but also a source of applause for their positions. This praise becomes the motor of leftism. I continue here on a theme that I have covered elsewhere: the search for social recognition becomes the driving factor in the actions of the hyper-civilized, and, by extension, of the leftist as well. To escape the gloom of existence, the human is captive to organizing principles that give meaning to their being. Democracy has been an organizing principle for the leftist. He or she passes through existence thinking that one day the great sun will appear on the horizon and shine in their favor, the realization of their most altruistic dreams. Nevertheless, social recognition appears to be another source from which meaning flows, which is evident in their writings, full of romantic aspirations in which hope is never lost and triumph is always waiting just around the corner. Such is the pretentious writing of these altruistic folks. “Look at me, I’m doing

57 revolution!” they proclaim behind their veil of pedantry. “Look at me!” quickly becomes, “Applaud me!” The desire for praise is the most addicting taste for the leftist who is trying to get through life by hiding in his own world where he is a revolutionary. Meanwhile, outside of his dreamworld, change is nowhere to be found. This fantastic world of appearances, as the Nietzsche might call it, is found on social networks that present to the gaze of the multitude, the decisive revolutionary. Of course this is all to receive admiration and praise. The leftist achieves catharsis, his desire is temporarily satisfied. Full of social recognition, the proper subject finds another use for the Internet. He or she sees the opportunity to make the masses more conscious, and with great ease they achieve the task demanded by the revolution. Marx and Engels in their intense philosophical debates expressed the following against the idealist currents: This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. Leftist intellectuals will argue that action needs a correct interpretation of the world. That is to say, they would defend with tooth and claw the importance of a change of consciousness prior to practice. That is not up for dispute. The issue is that current leftism has revived revolutionary phraseology and transferred their struggle to the world of phrases. That is to say, it stalls in word games and media. Their great revolutionary struggle is stalled in the desire to change consciousness, and the hope for that mental revolution becomes another driving principle. In that way, the leftist joins social recognition and revolutionary phraseology with the purpose of finding light in the shadow of life. How and when that “necessary” change of consciousness will arise in the revolutionary process is something that is always waved

58 off with the excuse that the conditions are not right for a violent social movement. At least this is what they repeat over and over again at every opportunity, but still they call themselves revolutionaries. Their words do nothing else but search for social recognition. Throwing a tantrum on social media is not revolutionary action, in spite of what those self-proclaimed saviors of humanity think. Any act that attacks the established order carries risk, of either prison or death, as well as of social disgrace and societal rejection. This was the case with the Mexican guerilla movement in the 1970s that was persecuted by the Mexican state, and was also unpopular to the greater part of the Mexican population. These days the CISEN [the Mexican intelligence agency] would quickly discover the contemporary leftist martyr because such a martyr would publish on social media the location of their hideout. The leftist militant opts for the party that has the advantage of satisfying their many needs. For example, they avoid a life in hiding, which is needed for a guerilla movement. The party militant can openly express their ideological positions and militancy, and await positive affirmation for doing so. They don’t have to live in hiding or live a double life, as do eco-extremists. The life that the eco-extremist leads excludes all forms of personal praise. You don’t go about bragging about how you are a member of the Tendency. The leftist would fall into deep depression if the radical movement required (outside of prison) a life in hiding or a double life. In these conditions there is no room to express yourself as a person to be applauded by the revolutionary fan club on the Internet. In similar manner, there are leftists who do not belong to the chosen political party. They end up joining together in organizations that only appear at important moments to wave flags of “We are the revolution.” Social networks are used to boast and to “raise the consciousness of the masses.” Their method of creating “revolutionary consciousness” is highly questionable. It’s nothing but the eternal boring phraseology discussed earlier. Their struggle is hidden in the world of words, always avoiding confrontation since it would end the comfort of being kings of the revolutionary spectacle. Mexican leftism is far from bringing about a better country, even if the leftists themselves don’t want to admit it. I would in-

59 vite them to reflect on their actions, even though this invitation is like shouting into the wind. They will continue to be enthusiasts absorbed in the social recognition that “revolutionary struggle” has to offer. Nourishing themselves on it, they will use Facebook and Twitter to achieve catharsis when things don’t turn out how they initially imagined. At the end of the day, they are hyper-civilized par excellence, tied to hope. Their particular organizing principles are revolution, fighting for a better world, and the erotic satisfac- tion produced by praise for their principles. All of this merely to keep their hand away from the gun they could use to blow their brains out.

Huehuecoyotl alias Jeremías Torres Torreón April-August 2017

[1] It is funny how not only leftists but also anarchists of an acute sense of morality have accused ITS and other eco-extremist groups of being agent provocateurs of the Mexican state. The idiocies that come out of the mouths of Saintly Anarchists, lovers of morality and the good, are many.

60 61 Breaking Down the Bars of the Anarchist Cages: brief reflections of an ex-anarchist

62 1. It’s a pain in the ass to speak while forgetting totally the rosary one learned in years past. It’s hard to write without ten dollar words or jargon. This text seeks to explain why we stopped believing in anarchism. Simply writing “believe,” in the sense of an act of faith or whatever you want to call it, still short-circuits our domesticated brains. Another short circuit is to stop writing with “k” and start writing correctly because this is not going out merely to the little anarcho-world but to all who want to read it and understand our reasonings. It has been months of many short-circuits. It’s easier to eat whatever there is, to not look for “alternative” positions, styles, or ways of life that go nowhere and only serve to give the appearance of being on the offensive. Oh, the offensive! There’s nothing left to do but separate yourself from the herd of black sheep and their self-referential meetings, far from the offensive that looks very much like the defensive. Little by little it was all the same to us.

2. The mental molds are a cage worse than any jail, almost on the same level as civilization. We say this with some difficulty: we are anarchists in retreat, on our way out, in doubt. We had a whole life enclosed in innocence and then in an anarchist political current. We began understanding that the State, even the form of being/ resisting of someone rejecting any form of authority, is not the principal problem of what we now understand to be freedom. We are not shameless enough to say that we broke the molds already. It has been a long process, sometimes a painful one. But a totally informal contact with people who have formed the top of the lance of the Tendency has helped quite a bit. Reading them over the Internet especially—since you won’t see them at an anarchist concert or in an anti-prison meeting selling vegan food. And some close contacts, faces unknown to us, who in spite of the coldness of the Internet, have filled with warmth this process

63 of revising our ideological positions. Reading former comrades has helped… Well, one in reality: Kevin Garrido, an anarchist who was arrested carrying out a clearly anti-prison action, but who in jail has been absorbing the Tendency. It is notable that he is going through the same process as we are. You can tell as well that he is also being abandoned by his cowardly former friends of the anti-prison movement.

3. How many years were we convinced that insurrectional attack was urgent. We defended it to the death, the same with affinity and informalism. We believed in solidarity among comrades and the international dimension of the struggle. Bla, bla, bla. We laugh about it now, because for years these were strong talking points concerning how we wanted to change the world. Those words were were in book fairs, supposedly secret meetings, benefits, and every other place where we participated. As anarchists we lived from spontaneity and activism. Words were never lacking, there were always many, but that was all. Living while creating tension made us docile, happy; it marked our lives and we don’t deny that past. In retrospect we believe that it domesticated us to this fucked-up civilization. Sure, we felt feral, free spirited, and like we had brief but intense depar- tures from that domestication. Until now. It was only at this moment that we have felt the need to clarify something that distinguishes us and makes us different, something that is not only a way of feeling and seeing things but also a guide for our actions. Because anarchist action is different from others. It is support- ed by the delicate but firm anarchist morality, in which all initia- tives have a specific and clear end and a precise target. In this the central premise is the question of disillusion- ment. The laws of anarchist monasticism do not permit killing or wounding people who not related directly to the terrorist action. Excuse me, I know that old comrades don’t like the word, terrorism. What’s more, it’s offensive to call it that. They consider human

64 life to be a good that should be preserved and not sacrificed. It’s that simple and essential. The bystander or unintended victim represents that life. But, the life or the imprisonment of the attacker, is it no less valuable? At this stage the informal anarchist is imprisoned in his schemas. At this stage they are restricted in their projects, whatever those happen to be. Perhaps the absence of action is the guarantee of their own morality? Morality that is nothing else but the fear of dying… or fear of imprisonment. While all of these comrades are bottled up in this moral debate, others have passed into a real offensive. Anarchism is part of a past that we are not going to recover. The amoral method of nihilist-mafioso terrorism has clearly won out and is currently what characterizes our, now well-known, “offensive.”

4. We are a species that from its origins has been gregarious and that is now even more so in war! Even though we cannot see the faces of the warriors of ITS, we know that they are our brothers in a tribe beating the war drums. They call us to join with them around the bonfire! We keep thinking that human groups need to live in community. The problem is that we don’t see that as possible today. Civilization has advanced its pillaging of the Earth to the point that almost no wild humans are left. Those who are, are threatened and keep themselves isolated deep in the jungle. Let it be clear. We too are civilized humans. We live in the middle of this false cement jungle, isolated from natural community life. We don’t think that ITS think themselves to be truly wild either. If some believe in supernatural forces, in pre-Columbian gods, it’s because they can. And that’s it, there is no other explanation. We have broken with the civilized mold of the ultra-anarchist. For example, we have noticed that preaching atheism has done nothing to oppose the advance of civilized religion. And

65 sure, we also believe in authority. It will always exist. Immoral clans will always have one who directs others better or realizes a particular task in a better way. We feel, and that is sufficient—we don’t need to have dog- matic arguments about it—that animism and the spirits that ac- company the wild peoples are something positive. Eco-extremist comrades very sincerely pursue egoist goals. If they believe in spirits that’s their choice. It’s what THEY feel. It is a feeling born from human nature. And it’s a more valid argument than rejecting these forces because of anarchist reasoning, which is as repugnant to us as the religions of the hyper-civilized world.

5. The reader needs more reasons? Look for them, but do it honestly. Break the molds that choke you. Return to critique, even of the anarchist canons. The one enemy people have indicated to you is not the only one. Nature and our undomesticated anarchists should have their revenge. The guilty one is ultracivilized society in its totality. You, me, everyone. And thus you will know that it’s no use to live in resistance, or to cause societal tension as they say… That is, you can do activism for five thousand years and nothing will change. The destructive force of progress cannot be stopped. But it can be terrorized, punished, and purged. And for this you can’t continue to be an anarchist, we feel. At least not in the current style.

66 67 Poem

This shitty misery dries my brain. It does not allow me to see beyond, surrounded by disgusting humans. I do not want this, the only thing that I appreciate is the ability to notice this situation. And that the hate is so strong. Thank you hate, you lifted me up from my life full of fear and woes. Or they were things that mu- tated in you, it’s no longer important. The rhythm is clamorous, the search has no end.

What does it matter if tomorrow I wake up decapitated?

If tomorrow I wake up drowned in my own vomit, or if they slit your throat. There is no longer a reason to be happy. Neither you nor I understand the truth of the situation, but for me there is nothing more real than hate. Nothing more real that gnashing one’s teeth, the tense muscles, the untrusting and arrogant stare; the proud and elevated spirit, the hands desiring to hang you, the heart beating rapidly, the anxiety that causes me to shake. To feel that time's up, it’s ending, it’s done.

How great is the era of catastrophe!

How glorious is the death that visits this accursed race! The insane prayers are shouted to it desperately that take us away from here, far, far away, to somewhere where we will no longer violate the earth. It will rest after us, the bastard children, the excrement of the galaxy, the terminal illness of ourselves. Glorious bacteria eat our insides, bacteria goddesses, queens of horror and human grief, representatives of death, emissaries of mortality. These will reclaim our days, they will reclaim the human plague. It’s going, we’re going, goodbye life, goodbye, toward that out of which we should have never left, to return to the inorganic. There is only one lost paradise, the unconscious.

Swallow us, earth, vomit us, crush us like cockroaches, and tomorrow will be and we will not be. What a glorious day! The deepest night!

69 Death that kisses us and bites us, our liberator, take us, take us out of here. We are the dumb hindrance.

My pride is to despise them above all things, to despise myself above all things. There is greatness, my greatness. Everything else is idiocy, fears of our end. The lightning strike now comes, the acid comes, the fire will take us away. It will burn us, crush us, and that day the most awake, the most pure, will cry from happiness. The most degenerate will shriek from horror, and there our happiness will be higher than our pride, greater than our attacks. May our violence reign, reign, war is our mother and terror our father. We will be the agonizing anti-human that despises them, that despises itself. But who, who else will want to burn his neighbor? No one, that’s why we remain alive, because in our process of self-annihilation we have to take with us as many as we can. All, come, come, let’s kill ourselves, don’t be afraid. Aim at me, shoot this lead at me, I will return fire and we will die with dignity, happy. We shall die killing, because it’s the only dignified destiny that can be lived. The rest is cowardice, it is to be human. We are beasts, animals, cannibals, predators.

Behind, behind society, don’t look at us. You will become a mountain of ash.

From the accursed lands in the south of the world (Chile) Krren oscuro

70 71 The PsychoPathogen: The Serial Killer as an Anti- body Response to Modernity

72 Introduction Serial killers are both glamorized and reviled in our culture. At first, this may be confusing but in a lot of ways, it really makes sense. Anything as liminal as serial killers is bound to evoke feelings of opposing and competing emotions because that’s what trickster energy is and serial killers are in many ways one of the purest expressions of trickster energy that exists within modernity. Let us think about it for a minute. Serial killers are etheric, they move in and out of the consensus reality, seemingly moving in from the shadows, wraithlike, to pluck victims from the circle of civilization’s light only to recede and fade back into the darkness that defines the borderland of the civilized. Their identity is unknown and therefore they occupy the space of “the other”. They avoid detection, even, at least for a time, the long arm of law and it’s supposed infallible co-conspirator, science. The serial killer IS the boogeyman. In doing all this the serial killer becomes the spooky campfire story, the cautionary bedtime tale, the scary object that parents and teachers can wave at children and yes, legend. However, one thing I’ve not seen in all the writings I combed through for this piece was an attempt to understand what evolutionary purpose the serial killer may serve. While this is not the place to unpack and contrast differing ideas regarding the earth’s biosphere and its relative intelligence or at least it’s sys- temic ability to self-correct, we can probably settle on some kind of general agreement that whether intelligence or blind system, there is a principle at work on this planet that is the macrocosmic expression of the same principle that causes white blood cells to attack certain biotic elements in creatures while ignoring others. So, for example, a cold virus triggers an autoimmune response while certain intestinal bacteria do not. Also, we can see this principle played out in certain animal populations and cohabitating flora and fauna populations that will fluctuate depending on the robustness of others in the same bioregion. One example of this is the famous National Park Service’s Wolf Project at Yellowstone, which showed that the density of wolf populations affected Aspen populations. For some of us, the inevitable connection between

73 wolf and tree populations is not too surprising, but it seems that “experts” today need a refresher in holistic thinking. Can we view the serial killer as a reaction, based on some of the same principles that drive the aforementioned examples? I don’t see why not. My intention here is not to put you to sleep with piles of facts and dry stilted academic language. I am much more of a populist writer so if you are looking for a dry academic paper on my assertions, I suggest you write one yourself if you are so capable. My intention here is to walk you through some points to think about as I suggest a thought experiment. Instead of simply writing off serial killers with some kind of moral judgment bolstered by ad hominin, let’s try to see if we can find a larger purpose to their existence and yes, their activities. While I won’t be so foolish and naive as to assume most or even many of the people performing activities that would qualify as “serial killings” are aware of the purpose they are serving, this does not negate the fact that they may still be serving those functions or even driven by forces larger than their personal motivations and reasoning or lack thereof. In the next section, we will attempt to define serial killers, and talk about other classes of mass killers we will include for the purpose of this piece since this is not a forensic analysis. Once we have done that, we will build the case for our thesis and then end with some thoughts, since unlike most methods used in these kinds of presentations, we would instead like to present thesis, antithesis and then leave the act of synthesis up to you the reader, since we are pretty sure that if you picked up this book, you are probably the type who not only doesn’t need to be hand-held through the synthesis process but are most likely the type who would, justifiably, be insulted if I attempted to do so. For the record, I would be insulted if I had been asked to, so we’re even on that score. Also, I’d like to add here, that I am aware that the ideas I am presenting here will win me no friends in the mainstream world and will most likely make me enemies in the “alternative” and/or “anarchist” milieu, and while that is not my intention in presenting this material, to provoke such responses are inevitable. I also will not allow the inevitable arousal of such hostilities to act as a chilling effect. I am not attempting to

74 be a troll or what’s known on the Internet as an “edgelord”. I am in fact acting in accordance with my personal ethos as a “freedom of expression extremist”. Do what you will with that information. What we lack in today’s mixed-up, manic world of media oversaturation and the dissociative normalcy of everyday life is moxie. People have generally become lame, halt, effete—in other words, pussies. The outlaw has been removed yet one more space from the pale to now reside in a liminal state where he is feared, reviled but never revered or even tolerated. This has not always been the case. When certain primal forces are repressed, when ar- chetypal forces are denied or repressed, they find a way to emerge, bringing with them the force built up from the duration of the repression. This is an analogy borrowed from fluid mechanics but it works. To put it simply, add obstruction to a dynamic pressure situation and eventually those pent-up forces erupt. The shadow is not an “evil” force. It is in fact quite necessary and even integral to survival. The trickster, an archetype that seems to have been sidelined in this age of modernity, used to be the central character of many stories, some of the most powerful in fact, involving creation and vital life lessons that are really survival information, transmitted through the ages in one of the oldest forms of information technology used by humans. Namely, storytelling, which in essence is an interplay of the worlds of phenomenal, noumenal and liminal. The trickster is a manifestation of but is not separate from the liminal realm. To explain this simply think of an apple growing from an apple tree. The apple is a part of the apple tree and always was, but the apple is a certain manifestation of the tree. Not separate and yet, not entirely the same. The trickster has always been with us because the trickster is us, even if we do define it as “the other”, simply because first stage awareness often takes the form of an “I and thou” relationship, which seems to be how humans begin to form a concept, so as to talk and think, i.e. communicate something. However, just as we have fooled ourselves into this false concept of “I and thou” so as to better navigate 3D space and phenomenal demands, we have come to think of the “other” as separate and distinct from us. This is absurd of course when you think about it, as absurd as an apple

75 tree deciding that the apples it produces are something other than itself, but in this age of Technos, Psyche has been pushed to the sidelines, taking with her all her liminal allies including the trickster. As we described earlier, you can never really silence the liminal forces, but you can suppress them, for a while at least and in so doing, you ensure that their eventual emergence will be a violent and reactive one. There are many forms that this emergence can take and the list is too long for our purpose here, so we will focus on one general category of that eruption and then we will focus in on one specific vertical of that category. The category we speak of, of course, is the criminal, the outlaw, the rebel, the one who wears the wolf’s head (caput gerat lupinum), the romantic image of the criminal as a recurring trope, and in particular the vertical of recidivist criminal behavior known as serial killings and the people who commit them. We will look at how the tactics of serial killers can be useful to the modern anti-civ contrarian and even useful to the goal of tipping societal forces toward the direction of the complete collapse of civilization and its stifling tentacles. This, of course, can also lead (one hopes) to the total extinction of the human race on this planet, which in the end is the antidote that life needs to thrive and even possibly survive on this planet. There are those who would call this the goals and attitude of a species traitor and we would not disagree with that definition. One of the many manifestations of the repressed primal nature and the constant staring eyes of the panopticon erupting in ways that the societal system finds aberrant is the serial killer. While many will not be able to see the inherent value of serial killers to the greater good, I would like to take this opportunity to unpack and examine some of the possibly overlooked values that these lone wolves add to our collective experience. Once we strip away the sensationalism that has too often been associated with these agents of the liminal, we are left with a phenomenon that has not been analyzed fairly and without emotional bias. First, let us talk about the phenomena of serial killings in general, so as to establish a baseline definition, so we can speak from a common understanding since there is so much hysteria and misinformation

76 concerning this subject.

What is a serial killer? A serial killer is defined by Wikipedia as “A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, usually in service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break (a “cooling off period”) between them. Different authorities apply different criteria when designating serial killers; while most set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example, defines serial killing as “a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone” The difference of definition among the various sources is indicative of how divided many so-called experts are among even themselves as to what constitutes a serial killer or killers, so we will simplify the definition here and simply say, that we will take the words literally. Serial, pertaining to, arranged in, or consisting of a series, occurring in a series rather than simultaneously, effect- ing or producing a series of similar actions. So, by this simple definition, we can accept that two or more would qualify as a serial, whereas killer should not need any definition, but for the sake of symmetry, we will say, a person or thing that kills. So, by definition, famous eco-terrorist Charles Manson (do an Internet search for ATWA) is not a serial killer, that we know of, because he himself, as far as we know, never killed two or more people but rather, convinced his followers to do it. Alternatively, Ian Brady did, in fact, kill several people in consecutive acts, so he would qualify. As would others like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and Jef- fery Dahmer, to name but a few. By definition alone, Ted Kaczyn- ski as an individual or the group ITS in fact qualifies. Whether or not that aligns with your sentiment about the situation is another matter.The FBI and other organizations also attach all kinds of various qualifiers such as ritualism and sexual motivations, but these are speculative at best, so we will not use them for our purposes here. Besides, it is pretty obvious that these types of char-

77 acterizations are used by law enforcement as both a way to dispar- age the killers to both the public and as a personal attack directed at the killer’s intent to provoke. This is a way of presenting them as pariahs to the public because as much as it is no longer the case in the ever-fickle media, there was once a time when serial killers were in many ways darlings of the media. Some experts opined that this created an incentive for killers to perform for the media by executing bigger, bolder and more daring acts of violence in order to garner more attention. This was partially demonstrated by killers like the Zodiac, who seemed to receive great pleasure from taunting the media and the police through the medium of the news. The experts, of course, all flocked to the media to offer their opinion how this was a character flaw and became another point in the so-called profile of serial killers, that of the narcissist. As I see it, this may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. Much of what is known about serial killers is based on relatively few known cases. Hickey (2002) provides perhaps the most detailed look into the reality of serial homicide. However, it is important to note that although Hickey’s research provides data on serial killers from 1850 to 1995, the total number is only 400. Indeed, it can be argued that the small number of killers is indicative of just how mythical the phenomenon has truly become. The original FBI study used as the basis for criminal profiling was based on only 30 offenders (Hickey, 2002). Further, what is “known” about serial killers must be tempered with the realization that the data is somewhat questionable. In short, there is much more unknown than known about serial killers and serial killing. Hence my asser- tion that they are manifestations of trickster energy. The media, of course, reinforces this by assigning or repeating nicknames (Son of Sam, The Zodiac, The Boston Strangler, etc.) as well as exaggerating or sensationalizing the true facts surrounding the cases where serial killers are involved. As one study has noted, since the 1920s, over 300 serial killer themed films have been produced creating myths about serial homicide and serial killers (Hickey, 2002). This is very telling when to comes to comparing the appeal of serial killers on a visceral level versus official or public opinion. Serial killers are mythical. If they embody any mythical being it is, of

78 course, the trickster. Even in the apparent contradiction between polite societies expressed attitudes versus actual behaviors the trickster’s liminal properties shine through.

Serial Killer Methods .Holmes and DeBurger (1988) have described four types of serial murderers. The visionary type hears voices, which command them to commit such horrendous acts. The mission-oriented type believes it is their duty to exterminate the evil people in the world. These “evil” people may include prostitutes or specific ethnic groups. The hedonistic type commits violent acts for the fun of it. Labels have also been used to determine different motives for murderers. Profit, passion, hatred, power, revenge, fear and desperation are just a few (Hickey, 2002). Other possible motives include greed, jealousy, drugs, and sex (Douglas, 1995). Notice that these “killers” have a lot in common with terrorists. Some of the similarities are the random (or seemingly random) choice of victims, the shock effect of the number and often the staging of their victims. A few serial killer traits that an anti-civ extremist may find useful: Non-linear and therefore difficult to predict or pattern Avoidance of police, therefore, strengthening the mythological status High mobility Methodical attention to detail They look like an average person But I digress.

Organized and Disorganized Killers Law enforcement claims there are two types of serial killers. The organized and the disorganized. Since the disorganized seem to get caught quicker and more often than the organized type, we will focus on the characteristics of the organized. This feels more useful and utilitarian as an approach.

Organized Offenders

79 According to the offender and crime scene dichotomy, organized crimes are premeditated and carefully planned, so little evidence is normally found at the scene. Organized criminals, according to the classification scheme, are antisocial (often psychopathic) but know right from wrong, are not insane and show no remorse. Based on historical patterns, organized killers are likely to be above-average intelligent, attractive, married or living with a domestic partner, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning and controlled. They have some degree of social grace, may even be charming, and often talk and seduce their victims into being captured. With organized offenders, there are typically three separate crime scenes: where the victim was approached by the killer, where the victim was killed, and where the victim’s body was disposed of. Organized killers are very difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and often are forensically savvy, meaning they are familiar with police investigation methods. They are likely to follow the news media reports of their crimes and may even correspond with the news media. Ted Bundy, Joel Rifkin, and Dennis Rader are prime examples of organized killers.

Modus Operandi and Signature In addition to the organized/disorganized dichotomy, a serial killer may leave traces of one or both of the following behavioral characteristics: MO (modus operandi or method of operation) and signature—the personal mark or imprint of the offender. While every crime has a MO, not all crimes have a signature. The MO is what the offender must do in order to commit the crime. For example, the killer must have a means to control his victims at the crime scene such as tying them up. Significantly, the MO is a learned behavior that is subject to change. A serial killer will alter and refine his MO to accommodate new circumstances or to incorporate new skills and information. For example, instead of using rope to tie up a victim, the offender may learn that it is easier and more effective to bring handcuffs

80 to the crime scene. The MO of Jack the Ripper, for example, was that he attacked prostitutes at night on the street with a knife. The signature, on the other hand, is not required in order to commit the crime. Rather, it serves the emotional or psychological needs of the offender. The signature comes from within the psyche of the offender and it reflects a deep fantasy need that the killer has about his victims. Fantasies develop slowly, increase over time and may begin with the torture of animals during childhood, for example, as they did with Dennis Rader (“Bind, Torture, Kill”). The essential core of the signature, when present, is that it is always the same because it emerges out of an offender’s fantasies that evolved long before killing his first victim. The signature may involve mutilation or dismemberment of the victim’s body. The signature of Jack the Ripper was the extensive hacking and mutilation of his victims’ bodies that characterized all of his murders.

Staging and Posing The FBI profiler may also encounter deliberate alterations of the crime scene or the victim’s body position at the scene of the murder. If these alterations are made for the purpose of confusing or otherwise misleading criminal investigators, then they are called staging and they are considered to be part of the killer’s MO. On the other hand, if the crime scene alterations only serve the fantasy needs of the offender, then they are considered part of the signature and they are referred to as posing. Sometimes, a victim’s body is posed to send a message to the police or public. For example, Jack the Ripper sometimes posed his victims’ nude bodies with their legs spread apart to shock onlookers and the police in Victorian England.

Dispelling some common myths of serial killers There is a lot of misinformation about serial killers, mostly propa- gated by the media via yellow journalism and popular movies. Here’s a few facts that can help dispel a few of those rumors. Many victims are strangers There are many motives to kill other than past sexual abuse: rejection, anger etc…

81 Several cases don’t involve sex at all Almost 17% of serial killers are female Only 2-4% are legally insane Some stay in a local area (Hickey, 2002)

Serial Killers as a Natural Release Mechanism Serial killers have throughout time, often occupied the spotlight, whether it be via rumor and legend, scary bedtime stories or more recently, in the media, which is the modern equivalent of all the above. As we have briefly discussed earlier in this article, the serial killer could be equated to some sort of antibody reaction and while that may sound somewhat speculative, it is also not outside the bounds of the possible. So, as a thought experiment, let’s assume that is the case. What exactly would the function of this antibody reaction be in response to and what form does it take? We see certain fail-safes kicking in during times of overpopula- tion with rat and monkey colonies. These fail-safes can take the forms of cannibalism or infanticide and are a built-in in response to environmental stress that is introduced into a population due to overcrowding, increased competition for food, a shortage of or over competition for mating partners and a variety of other factors. Civilization’s present state is one of massive stress for the average person, overcrowding, overstimulation, hyper-competition for resources, environmental stressors, the list goes on. Why would it be so hard to fathom that some sort of hither unidentified fail- safes may arise in these unparalleled times of stressors? What forms those fail-safes may take are unknowable and quite frankly, unpre- dictable. A culling urge may drive some serial killers on a deeper level than even they may be aware of.

The Serial Killer as “hero” In recent times, serial killers have taken on a romantic aspect with the public. From the sensationalistic presentation of Jack the Rip- per, to the glamorous portrayal of Charles Manson by some of the counterculture media, all the way to the fetishization of serial killers in book and movie form, with media products like Dexter,

82 and the Hannibal media products, endless reality TV, documentary and docudrama presentation of cases like the Menendez Brothers, Columbine, True Detective, et al., it is apparent that the manifestation of the trickster, known as the Serial or Spree Killer, is not going away anytime soon. It seems to be a subject that screams to be examined yet it is uniformly tamped down as a subject for serious discussion in “civilized society”. When we consider some of the most modern manifestations of this phenomenon, namely groups like ITS (Individualists Tending Toward Savagery) or Ted Kaczyn- ski and the reaction of vilification within the so-called anarchist milieu of such groups or individuals and their tendencies, we see the same taboo in action that has always dogged this phenomenon. Namely, instead of addressing it as a possibly naturally occurring phenomenon, theoretically a manifestation of nature, it is shoved to a dark corner, vilified, buried in ad hominem and most telling, not discussed openly and on its own terms. If anyone does try to invite such a conversation, they end up spending all their time and energy defending themselves from insincere critique, infantile name calling campaigns and yes, even threats of physical harm and sexual violence. I have witnessed attacks using those aforementioned tactics on a few people willing to invite conversation on these types of subjects. I shouldn’t even have to point out the obvious contradictions here, but I find I often do. It would seem that many people in a milieu that professes to be a conversation outside the predominant paradigm have some very peculiar ideas of what is “permitted” as a subject of rational discourse. I will quote Hasan i Sabah here, or at least William Burroughs para- phrasing Hasan i Sabah, “Nothing is True, Everything is Permit- ted”. Of course, I am a free expression extremist, so I am personally used to the constant attempt at coercion and the non-stop chilling effect that in itself is a natural response to a phenomenon that frightens the intellectual cowards among us. The trickster is probably one of the most enduring archetypes across cultures, the list of stories about the trickster character is truly universal, perhaps the most universal of all archetypes. One of the things that is not discussed much in polite circles, is the obvious fact that the criminal is its mundane (earthly) manifesta-

83 tion. Many examples exist throughout history including Arthur Rimbaud with his exhortation that, “The first study of the man who wants to be a poet in the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! — But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [“kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters”], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face. I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhu- man strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed — and the supreme Scholar! — Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other one collapsed!” Or Sigmund Freud’s quote, “One has to be a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without such criminality there is no real achievement.” to the story of Picasso inviting competing lovers over, unbeknownst to each other so he could be inspired to paint chaos and strife for Guernica, Jacques Mesrine, William S. Burroughs, Joe Gibbons and a horde of fictional characters, like the Joker (especially Heath Ledger’s portrayal), Tyler Durden, Colonel Kurtz as portrayed by Brando in Apocalypse Now, Charles Manson and his very early eco-terror organization ATWA, and of course the notorious O9A (or the Order of the NIne Angles) and their philosophy of The Dreccian Way... it is hard to understand why “He

84 who wears the wolf’s head” is not spoken about in polite company. Even Andre Breton said, “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well- defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.” One begins to wonder when art became so non-lethal and safe. Ok, so it may not be too hard to comprehend why such characters are somewhat shunned in a civilized society (not that I agree with that sentiment) but the subject seems to be entirely taboo unless one is hurling invectives and ad hominems in the direction of those that choose to live outside the pale. At least most of the time this is the case. There are a few times that one of these rebels sneaks over the transom of the everyday, such as the case of John Dillinger who was beloved by the average working folk and as mentioned, the early reception of Charles Manson by some elements of the counterculture press. It was only later that a concentrated effort to brand Manson as the “man who killed the 60s” overtook some of the praise for his “war on the pigs”. It is also relevant to mention that Manson later started ATWA with some followers and in many ways, set the precedent for groups like Wild Reaction/Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (Sav- agery), etc. The project I am directly involved in, thepsychopath. org is inspired and informed by all of these influences.

Are the Serial Killer’s actions actually anti-civ in nature? The question here is how much in alignment with the agenda of the anti-civ or species traitor is the serial killer’s actions and agenda? Does the serial killer share any qualities with terrorists and radical insurrectionists? Can the anti-civ tendency benefit or borrow from the modus operandi of the serial killer? Could the stealthy M.O. of the serial killer be used by the misanthrope in a manner akin to a ground based drone strike by a non-state actor? That, like everything, is a matter of opinion. I would like to take this time to see if we can unpack a few of those possibilities and be doing so, give anyone willing to form their own synthesis

85 some food for thought. Serial killers often pick symbolic targets, and they often leave messages to certain population segments or individuals through the act of ritual posing. One may even say that this is a form of artistic language and much like a communique that is sent out after a terrorist act by a person or group taking responsibility for the said act, it is a signature. Serial killers and terrorists share the need for a signature, for some very similar reasons. The serial killer and the terrorist seek context and direction of their seemingly random acts, and by applying a signature, much like an artist signing a painting or a poet signing their work, both the serial killer and the terrorist apply a directive to the act. By signing their work they assure that it doesn’t end up on the heap of “shit happens”, like so many of the random events that populate our life do. The signature says, “I did this and I did this for a reason.” One need look no further than the work of someone like Steve Hodel and his theories on the Black Dahlia killer to see the obvious connection to serial killer staging and art . One need look no further than the mythopoetic communiqués of a group like ITS or the actions of individuals like Ted Kaczynski to see the connection between terrorist activities and art. I use the word terrorist here purely as a description of the activity and not in the politicized vernacular which is to say not in a dismissive or disparaging sense. Their acts spread terror and I believe that this is their intention, plain and simple. That what they do also qualify as art is my opinion which I offer here for your consideration.

Postscript: Discarding the need for moral outcomes If you’re reading this journal it is my hope that we can dispense with certain introductions such as the definition of sanity and insanity and their irrelevant contexts within the framework of modernity, as well as concepts like criminal and law abiding. If you need tutoring on the illegalist attitudes I suggest you start by googling terms like illegalist and then maybe come back to this journal and read it anew. If we are on the same page or at least on a page in the same chapter, then let us consider the charge of violence and it’s necessity or lack thereof. There are clearly times when violence

86 is justified and in fact to not respond to certain situations with violence is in essence negligence.If you or members of your group, tribe or family are in jeopardy, and you do not respond with the force necessary to repel that threat, doesn’t that signify that you are malfunctioning as a biological entity on this planet? Today the fact that we are being systematically exterminated by civilization and its zombie cheerleaders can only be refuted by the most hyp- notized, delusional or outright dishonest among us. Much like a small group of people fighting for survival from a flood, those that cannot or worse, who will not swim, can bring about the demise of those who in fact are struggling to survive after a shipwreck. It is not inhumane to divest yourself of a group of people who are not only not contributing to the solution but due to their panicked thrashing may be vastly contributing to the problem. Anyone who has ever tried to help a drowning person already knows this from experience.This is why there really is no such thing as collateral damage in a struggle for survival and this is why I would argue that the so-called innocent victims of random acts of terrorism are neither innocent nor victims. They are complicit on a lot of levels and mostly by their inactivity and refusal to resist the juggernaut of civilization and its many agents of complicity. Likewise, the naysayers and critics of those who would take action are complicit and therefore are legitimate targets of anyone who would take it upon themselves to push back, lash out or fight the never-ending, soul-crushing encroachment of the stifling death of both mind and body that comes as part of the package deal known as civilization. But you can always sit back and enjoy your neutering and lobotomization. I’m told it doesn’t hurt for long. Who knows, maybe someone reading this will take it upon themselves to experiment one night, invoke the trickster within, walk the dark streets and follow fate or even become fate itself.

Ezra Buckley

87 Tangled Hostility

88 Words have no meaning, they never truly did. The brittle outer shell peels off nonetheless.

The wetlands and black water of my home remain a target for industry to spoil. Sparsely populated and poor, it’s seen as a convenient outlet for vast amounts of waste that are disastrous to the entirety of the ecosystem. After years of being dismayed by the damage done through wetland logging and gross negligence I was surprised to see our area come up on Earth First! this summer. The story was about a proposed rail line that would be used to transport coal ash into a landfill near the Satilla and Altamaha rivers and the community’s resistance to Republic, the Arizona-based firm that would own the rail line. It was a fine story as reports on reformist environmental efforts go, but I’ve been so infuriated by a particular piece of information mentioned in passing. Listed among the credentials of a local “green-minded businessman” was the fact that he had lobbied for the construction of another prison in the area. He praised the prison for being a “growth industry without smokestacks.” The words of a friend have been repeating ever since when I think about that statement: “The day will come when Leviathan itself will be heralded as eco-friendly. The world-eater becomes the world-healer, while still destroying all in its path.” The realization that however vast we imagine the armor of Leviathan to be it will always be an understatement is never easy. The force that destroys life at every turn continues to unabashedly assume the mask of preservation. Even beyond the absurdity of a green industry, much less a green prison, the very idea of the carceral state contributing to the preservation of swamps and wetlands is so offensive that it verges on comedy. I immediately thought of the maroons: runaway slaves, indigenous people, and criminals who established their free communities in the middle of our (formerly) expansive swamps where the literal teeth and claws of American slave society (in the form of hounds) couldn’t follow them. To quote Richard Grant writing for Smithsonian magazine:

89 “Each ripping thorn and sucking mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.” In addition to leaving the system of slavery, they also appeared to abandon the ideals of the capitalist society that were forced upon them, as one inhabitant known as Charlie would later specify that all labor on the island was communal. Their utter rejection of this world shaped by colonialism is implied through their name, as the word “maroon” itself is thought to come from “cimarrón,” a word the Spanish applied to feral animals and later to the slaves who escaped the Spaniards’ cruelty: in other words, forms of life that resist commodification and colonial domestication. The qualities of the swamps themselves fostered this environment of opposition to the state, as the swamp stripped slaveholders and their police forces of civilized accoutrements in the form of horses and hounds. And even if the slave patrols managed to navigate the swamp and locate the maroon societies they could expect violent resistance and booby-traps along the way. Retreating to nature afforded these communities a chance to live freely and leave face-down in the mud, any lawman who would deprive them of that. Nature is no respecter of persons. Moving forward three hundred some-odd years Monsieur Du- pont’s Nihilist Communism made the point of the body itself being one of the few forces that remains incorruptible by capitalism. I would argue that this trait is inherited from our environment as nature and the body remains “enslaved but fundamentally unhelpful.” Dupont eventually arrived at a workerist position because they believed all political projects would be subsumed by capital to create an even more advanced capitalist society that could resist efforts to disrupt it. My departure from Dupont can be expressed succinctly: we’re shown by the example of the maroon communities that certain aspects of nature possess two key features that amount to more than a simple “drag on maximization,” those being a lack of distinct paths and total hostility to the armament of civilization. But like Dupont I reject political strategies and projects that involve merely shuffling the components of industrial civilization. As with the authors of baedan, I have no alternative to offer. All I

90 can put forward is my desire to move in such a way that invokes the chaos of my home. Not chaos in the traditional sense put forward by moralist anarchists when they say “anarchy is not chaos, but order” but chaos in the cosmic sense of something unknown that defies the logic of futurity. Something that presents no opportunities of development and co-optation to civilization and capital, but instead howls against it with tangled hostility. kohelet

91 The Mara Salvatrucha: The most dangerous gang in the world

92 The Mara Salvatrucha (MS) is a Salvadoran gang renowned for its exceptional criminality. This has caught our attention to an exceptional degree due to its modus operandi, its experience in arms trafficking, its ample range of criminal activities, its lessons on how to avoid the authorities, and more than anything else, its internationalization, which has been sharp like a wasp’s sting, swift and lethal like the Black Death. Here we aim to highlight the valuable lessons that the MS can teach us eco-extremists. Without any moral reservation, we under- take this as we seek to use any means at our disposal, to wage our own war in an individualist manner against all that wishes to domesticate us. We take our lessons from wherever we like, from the savage Selknam to the guerillas of Paraguay to the Salvadoran gangs. If they have something to teach us, why not learn from them? Without further ado, we will let the mafiosos explain.

The Maras, What They Are, and Where They Emerged Gangs known as maras dominate criminality in Central America. They are immortalized in images of violent men covered in tattoos who have an absolute disdain for the value of life. The Maras inspire fear and concern wherever they are found. The maras emerged in the barrios of Los Angeles in the 1980s during the time of civil wars raging in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador. Many refugees fled these countries searching for a better future and ended up in the Mexican barrios of Los Angeles. In the 1990s, crime had reached epidemic proportions and the US government began to enforce its immigration laws more strictly, swiftly deporting immigrants who were (or were found) guilty of crimes to their countries of origin. Upon their return to what is known as the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Gua- temala) the members of the maras were not able to reintegrate into society and they continued building criminal networks, and also relationships between those countries and gangs in the US. Internationalization In the beginning, the MS was made up of mostly Salvadorans, but the diversity of nationalities present in Los Angeles meant that this

93 changed quickly. When MS entered the criminal scene, other gangs decided to welcome them into their networks, especially the gang called the Mexican Mafia, a Californian group with control over the southern US and Mexico. The MS were offered protection in the prisons and barrios. In return, MS lent the Mexican Mafia hit- men and added “13” to their name since this corresponded to “M” being the thirteenth letter in the alphabet. From that time, the MS became MS-13, a criminal association organized around the Northern Triangle, Mexico, and the US. MS-13, like almost all of the maras, does not have a head or chief who controls all of the networks in an absolute manner. It works through cells or “clicas” in various territories that have their own chiefs known as “palabreros.” Confrontation with the Authorities Here we copy and paste a text taken from the press which reflects a little the current situation of the maras: Drop by drop of blood, the violence of the Maras in El Salvador increases daily. The recent threats against official agents did not take long to be realized, and from Sunday to Friday, four police agents, a soldier, and a director of the Metropolitan Agents Corps (CAM) were killed, some of them brutally: either decapitated or suffocated. The majority of officer victims, 61 so far in 2016 (41 police, 19 soldiers, and one agent of the CAM) were kidnapped and afterwards killed off-duty or while in their homes. This was the case with Carlos Arturo Flores, who this past Wednesday left his home in Yucaiquin, in the eastern department of La Union, with the intention of visiting his girlfriend. On Thursday his body was found decapitated and riddled with bullets near his residence. The Maras have called their action “an escalated war against the system,” in which the targets consist of the police, soldiers, prosecu- tors, judges, and prison guards. They have also warned that the aim is to have a “high murder rate by the end of the year.” Criminal Activities The Maras have a wide experience when it comes to criminal activities. These range from the ordinary criminal activity such as robberies and assaults that are everyday tasks of gang members to more ambitious robberies of large sums of money. There are many 94 executions, for everything from problems between gangs and rival groups, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, and even human trafficking. The activity that they are best known for is extortion. Extortion Extortion, also known as “rent” or “war tax” (in Honduras) is a method by which a quantity of money is taken from people, especially from transport workers and business owners. In general they send new gang members or women (who are used to throw the local authorities off at the moment of extortion) to collect money, which is collected weekly or monthly. If the rent isn’t paid, a bus is lit on fire or the person is assassinated. The amount of extortion money that is collected is believed to exceed 18 million dollars annually. Arms The gang members or Mareros tend to use high caliber weapons for their criminal activities and many of their murders are committed with firearms like pistols, shotguns, and even assault rifles like the AK-47 and M-16. In some cases they use other weapons such as knives and machetes. Generally in their attacks, they make sure not to leave the victim alive. They tend to shoot the head and the body many times if using firearms. In other cases, they will inflict mortal wounds, even to the point of dismembering the victim. Only rarely do the gang members resort to hand-to-hand combat. Aside from the use of arms they also collect contraband goods to sell and/or distribute to their own members. The Dispute Concerning Tattoos Many members of the MS have tattoos showing that they have pledged themselves to a leader. Among the favored designs are “MS,” “Salvatrucha,” “Devil Horns,” which is the name of one of their leaders. These tattoos were a fairly typical custom dating to the beginnings of the gang, but lately it is falling into disuse to avoid being identified due to their criminal endeavors. Interviewed Mareros and gang members indicate that at present there is a tendency to abandon the use of identifying symbols (especially tattoos) in order to not be so easily identified by au-

95 thorities. The tattoo is undoubtedly one of the more visible elements that provokes the most controversy for the stereotypes and persecutions it generates.

The Maras and the Indiscriminate The Maras do not tend to hesitate at the moment of executing their actions, even when this entails the deaths of supposed inno- cents. Leaving aside the motivations for acting in this case, we will highlight here the means by which they achieve their ends, without second thoughts. On December 23rd, 2004, the MS committed one of its most notable crimes in Chamelecon (Honduras). An intercity bus was stopped and fired upon, killing twenty eight passengers, the majority being women and children. Six armed men opened fire and one boarded the bus and methodically executed the passengers. The MS organized the massacre as a protest to the Honduran government reestablishing the death penalty in the country. In Febru- ary 2007, Juan Carlos Miranda Bueso and Darwin Alexis Ramirez were found guilty of these crimes, including murder and attempted murder. Ebert Anibal Rivera was also found guilty of the attack and was detained after having fled to Texas. Juan Bautista Jimenez was accused of planning the massacre, and was killed in prison. Accord- ing to authorities, he was hung by his cellmates who were members of the MS. There was not sufficient evidence to condemn Oscar Fernando Mendoza or Wilson Geovany Gomez.

Conclusion We can observe that these gang members are not characterized by nobility. Their warlike pride makes them hostile to others not in their gang. Within the group, they respect each other, they value each other, and they take care of each other. But those on the outside, those who are not of the gang, are viewed as the enemy. The cliques sprout up like factions and add up to an international criminal project that worries the authorities of all of the countries in which they operate. They live in constant conflict in their appearance as well as in their attitude towards life. These make them clash with the values of society and all that is considered politi-

96 cally correct. They usually cannot get jobs nor do they want them, though we know that this is not always the case. For this reason they have launched themselves without hesitation into criminal activities, assaults, robberies, extortion, and drug trafficking, among other endeavors. Experience has taught them much; for that reason the Maras have reformed some aspects of their organizational structure. For example, even though they were well known for their symbolic use of tattoos, they have renounced this practice in order to remain in the shadows, in order to not receive unnecessary attention from the police. In spite of official sources that indicate that these gangs are in decline, and are even looking for a truce, the chaos and murders keep extending the bloody print of these evil beings. They give their lives for the Maras, as we, eco-extremists, give our lives for our pagan deities and wild nature. They and we know what it means to live in a war that will continue, citing the words of one of their members, “until the end.” Extinción 1

97 A Statement from Innocence

98 This is a reflection from my profound innocence. To be honest, this was kind of hard to write. As a propagandist from the [Eco- extremist] Mafia I am far from innocent. My mind at this point is totally corrupted by the videos, terrorist manuals, texts, communiques, and actions of the Mafia. More than anything I’m just asking some questions to the “radicals” of society. So many things have been said about what we defend and what we believe that sometimes I start to believe them (LOL!). And all this from the hyper-civilized masses as well as the insurrectionist revolutionaries, the anti-authoritarian anarchists, and others. Obviously I don’t expect flowers from modern humans, nor understanding, nor flattery, nor acceptance, nor anything of the kind. I only expect the worst from them. But the criticism we received from others, those radicals who are at war against the state and prisons and the rest, really that throws me off a bit. To be honest I expected at least a small difference in the reactions of the citizen and of the anarchist warrior, but well, it’s clear that this wasn’t the case. I thought (in my innocence) that the anarchists would have (a little) more understanding toward us than the average citizen, but from what I can tell they repudiated us even more strongly. That’s how things are at this point. What surprises me a bit is that those who consider themselves most radical in society, who fight against power and who are enemies of the law etc. are those who are stirring up the most com- motion against us. These people are definitely not a bunch of white doves, nor are they common citizens, nor are they models of good behavior. So I find it strange that we receive so much rejection from them, not that I expected them to receive us with open arms, nor that they would invite us to their book fairs, nor to speak of their meetings concerning prison abolition. So really I am just realizing that we are so disgusting that not even the cream of the crop of the radical sphere wants anything to do with us. We could say with all certainty that we eco-extremists are so horrible that we are outcasts among the outcasts. And that is because the last installment of this “war against eco- extremism” has escalated into violence. Everyone now knows what

99 happened in the anarchist book fair in the US. From then on the conflict has not remained in words written in books. Now the radicals call us out directly. They have invited others to confront us with blows if necessary (let’s see if they can find us first), they have called on others to chuck us in the garbage, and numerous other things. Some people in the US wrote a tome longer than the Bible extensively documenting various points, trying to refute other theorists of the Mafia and a large quantity of technical and academic information. And of course now the eco-extremists have become enemy #1. I am exaggerating on the last few things but reading some of these things the same impression remains. An important point to make is that the vast majority of the criticisms come from places where there is no eco-extremist activity whatsoever. More specifically, I mean the US, the UK, and even Indonesia. If it is the case that a constant flow of propaganda and information originates from the US, the Mafia has not carried out any attacks in that territory. The same is the case with Spain, the UK, and Asia. These are the places where people are taking it upon themselves to continue positioning themselves against the Tendency through issuing communiques and call-outs to the anarchist community. So now my serious question: Why is there so much conflict emanating from those places? It’s understandable that their anarchist comrades in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina are upset, since those are the places where the Mafia operates, and in those places there have been interesting “confrontations” between us and the anarchists. Let us remember that ITS burning a bus in Chile in 2016 caused a big problem, since this fire had little concern for the citizenry so that afterwards anarchists blew up a bank and reproached the eco-extremist discourse indirectly. In Argentina something similar happened concerning a magazine, not even to speak of Mexico: they have been dealing with this since 2011. Returning to the question of why there is so much hostility in other places, the answer I believe has something to do with how we present a problem that threatens something in their particular contexts. It is interesting to witness how supposed radicals start getting a bit concerned when more radical actions are carried out

100 like those of the Tendency. So why so much anger? Now I am realizing that even the blackest begin looking gray compared to the eco-extremist/misanthropic/nihilist/egoist force. What is certain is that ITS has turned into something horrible, scary, and infectious, which you have to separate yourself from as soon as possible or you run the risk of catching the extremist virus. These people worry me. The life of an eco-extremist is pretty paranoid since I have to be on the look-out for the police, citizen do-gooders, and now on top of all that, I have to watch out for anarchists. Who would have thought! It seems rather funny that we now have to be escaping from modern anarchos (some of them, anyway), but those are the times we live in. Personally, I am pleased that these anarchists are blowing up fire extinguishers, burning buses, and giving themselves over to violent action. Their devotion to these works is very respectable (as in the case of anyone carrying out violence). So let’s see if those with big mouths start putting their money where their mouth is, stop writing their entries on their blogs and start making devices… faggots. I am only stating this for the sake of the war so that it’s not extinguished, so that the anarchos of the future will see that they just didn’t devote themselves to talking shit. But well, I’ll leave it at that. I state it since I too was once waging that anarchist war, and was involved in their theory and praxis, and I am not sorry. On the contrary, I am happy that their bombs have started reappearing... But for now the Mafia will not take one step back, and neither will the politically-incorrect propagandists. Let the war against civilization and the modern human continue in the South and North! Against all, even the most ugly anarchists! A spirit of the South

101 Lions in the Brush: on the anatomy and guidelines of cell-structured resistance

102 The following piece is not intended to promote, condone, or ad- vocate any sort of illegal activity, just to analyze and identify a strategy commonly used in subversive activities to ensure anonymity and minimize the possibility of detection. This piece does not have any ideological or philosophical associations and is merely a rough guide on how cell-structured anonymity operates with maximum ability for success. The tactic was first introduced by intelligence officer Col. Ulius Louis Amoss in 1962. Amoss created the tactic under the belief that communists would take over the US, and believed that this method would ensure the chances of a successful resistance if that occurred. The method has been greatly expanded on since then and adopted by many groups, from the Animal and Earth Liberation Front, to white supremacists, to Islamic extremists, and beyond. My intention here is to lay out some guidelines developed over the years. One may be tempted to pick and choose what’s applicable in a given situation; however to maximize one’s chances of success, these guidelines should be strictly followed. In the end, it is up to you. Only you can decide what risk you choose to take or not take for your own sake.

Why choose cell structure? People may have many reasons for keeping some things they do and believe a secret, whether it is risking the loss of a high profile career or a positive public image. In fact in this political climate, laws could change so that you get labelled a criminal or terrorist for engaging in activities that were legal at the time. In fact laws could change that could make your views or associations illegal. Thus, it’s better to be safe than sorry. This piece is about safety, and ensuring to the best of one’s ability that you and others can remain anonymous and undetected in chosen activities, regardless of your reasons for that anonymity.

Above-Ground Activity vs. Covert Cell-Structured Activity In most case scenarios there either is, or at least should be, a barrier between those who engage in above-ground activity and those who engage in covert, cell-structured activity. Some characteris-

103 tics of above-ground activity would be making social-media posts aligned with one’s honest political, ideological, or philosophical views, attending riots or rallies, authoring material that can in any way be traced back to you, adding those aligned with your views on social media, becoming involved in public projects that align with one’s related views, etc. Those who engage in cell-structured (covert, underground) activity however, do not engage in or associate themselves with these types of activities, at least not in ways that risk being traced back to said individual(s). For those who engage in underground activity, it is ideal to refrain from any traceable online activity that would admit to association with the types of views related to the choice of activity one engages in, or attendance at rallies, public meetings, protests, riots, etc. The person who engages in cell-structured activity almost always leads a completely double life, often pretending to endorse opposite views (posting Gandhi quotes and favoring electoral politics on social media, for example). Even if this should be common sense, it should be reiterated that these two paths (above-ground and underground), are not compat- ible with one another, and it is often in the best interests of those involved in underground cell-structure activity to either avoid at all costs or at least sever all ties to those who openly share the same views. To put it simply: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

The cell vs. organization We're going to use the term “organization” loosely here, because this also applies to groups that wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves belonging to an organization, but in many ways still fall into the same structure (as is the case with many self-styled “anarchists”). The organization or scene can easily be infiltrated and erased without a terrible amount of effort. All it takes is an infiltra- tor to gather information and identify those involved or “enhanced interrogation” (i.e. torture) or other effective methods of coercion (convincing threats to loved ones, for example) to extract information about a particular group and their activities. Organizations and other large-group collaborations or associations are obsolete in their ability to survive any real state repression. The anatomy of cell structure, however, fosters immunity to these counter-strategies, or

104 any and all counter-strategies in most circumstances. There are two types of cells, sleeper cells and phantom cells. The sleeper cell consists of one lone wolf individual; the phantom cell is made of no more than two to five individuals. Anything beyond five members risks falling into the same pitfalls as the organization, and begins to lose its solidity, causing it to be more vulnerable to infiltration, compromising its effectiveness. More importantly, cell structure differs from the organization in that, if one cell is taken out and/or compromised, it remains physically impossible for that to have any effect on any other cell. If we drew one big circle or pyramid (the organization), imagine if it only took one pin to stick into the organization block to destroy it. In the case of cell structure, the only way to destroy the cells would be to pin them each, one by one, which means you would need to first locate and identify each and every one, and pick them off individually. The chance of successfully identifying all of those unknown numbers of underground cells is usually quite small. This is what gives cell-structured resistance its near invincibility. We will now address another benefit of this method: invisibility.

What happens in the cell stays in the cell This is probably the most important guideline to ensure effective cell-structured resistance. What happens in the cell stays in the cell. What does this mean? First and foremost it means no pillow talk, no bragging: accepting and reaffirming that you are not in it for glory or to make a name for yourself, because if you are, that’s what aboveground resistance is for. Go join a protest, get beaten up by the pigs, and use the story to get laid or to give you higher social status amongst your upper-middle class anarcho-hipster friends, because that’s not what this is about. This isn’t to say that releasing untraceable communiqués, for whatever reason of your choosing, isn’t acceptable. However, that has nothing to do with personal glory either, which is why they are “untraceable.” This entails taking a big risk, and if you choose that route, you better at least have very strong computer and physical OPSEC. Otherwise, you should not mention a word about the cell even to your partner, unless they’re in the cell as well. You don’t talk to close friends about it,

105 you don’t mention it to your mother, your father, or your siblings. What if one of them turns on you? What if they are confronted and tortured or otherwise coerced into giving information? What if they mention it to someone else? There should be no “what ifs.” What goes on in the cell stays in the cell. If you have loose lips, can’t lead a double life, or otherwise are needy for someone to listen to all your personal struggles, then I’ll repeat: go the easy path because this isn’t for you. Another major difference between cell structure and organization is that people you bring into a cell must uncompromisingly be those you can trust with your life. Ideally you've known them intimately in person for many years. It would also be desirable to have potential future cell members undergo a series of tests in the recruitment process to ensure that they have what it takes, or that they are not a state agent. This would include making sure that the person doesn’t have loose lips, a weak heart, a weak mentality, that they won’t crack under pressure, won’t turn on you out of moral scruples, etc. It is very important that only the most solid, unbreak- able, dedicated, and loyal individuals join the cell.

Further assuring anonymity The growth of technology and surveillance culture has made anonymity difficult in recent times. One thing that needs to be ad- dressed and considered is the concept of paranoia. One must be paranoid!!! Take every precaution you can to avoid detection. One major issue that we face today, which I think is dangerously overlooked and often not taken into consideration, is the probability for electronic devices such as cell phones to be used as surveillance and tracking devices, even when powered off. The ability exists with cell phones to even listen in on conversations through walls. As I mentioned earlier, some may label such a precaution as paranoia, but I repeat again, be paranoid! Whether leaked information concerning the NSA is accurate or not, the possibility certainly exists that even if others are not listening directly to your conversations, certain keywords could send triggers and flags to government agencies through the devices. The following are precautions to take in avoiding these pitfalls all together.

106 When discussing anything related to cell activity, do so far, far away from any cell phone; maybe put all cell phones, laptops, and tablets inside a vehicle and park it down the block. Beware, even some new TVs now are capable of listening to conversations. It is highly recommended that when doing anything related to cell- structure activity, leave devices at home, with trusted friends, or stashed in the bushes, even if running errands related to the activity such as purchasing any needed material. It’s also highly recommended that most if not all activities be done only in cities or towns that you are not known to frequent. The farther you need to travel, the better off you'll be. I can’t stress this enough, don’t engage in activities anywhere near where you frequent!!! Also use cash at all times; this should go without saying. Aside from these fundamental guidelines, it’s recommended that you always take all necessary precautions, be highly observant of your surroundings, be mindful of cameras (especially ones that can record license plate numbers), and study ways to dodge surveillance and be untraceable. Though somewhat outdated when it comes to considerations of new technology, the book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Indepen- dent Contractors by Rex Feral has plenty of useful information on how to avoid detection. The book is banned from further publica- tion, however ebook formats are available online, particularly with p2p programs such as can be found on slsknet.org. There you can search for all sorts of keywords for building an arsenal of knowledge that should produce results for many more ebook downloads. [Of course, at least use the TOR browser and similar means to ensure safe(r) surfing for materials of this type.]

The cell answers to no one but itself Those who engage in cell-structured resistance have absolutely no one to answer to but themselves, no organization to judge their conduct, and no leader or collective to persuade or control their behavior. The cell acts entirely out of its own independence and individuality. As far as strategy, tactics, intentions, goals, philosophy, conduct, etc., it is entirely for the cell to decide its influences and course of action. This causes strategy to become unbound, which allows for near limitless potential for strategic intelligence and

107 imagination. Some cells may choose to align more with one specific ideological current or philosophical perspective; this however is at the sole discretion of the cell, as it is under no one’s authority but its own. I’ll end this piece with a recommended song, and that is “Agent of Destruction” by P. Paul Fenech from the album Inter- national Super Bastard.

el borracho (nömad warfuk)

108 109 Paraguayan People’s Army: What can we learn from them?

110 The EPP is an armed organization from Paraguay officially found- ed in 2008 (although their origins and activities are traced by some analysts to 1997, from a splinter group detached from the Partido Patria Libre). The areas where they have a presence are in the de- partments of Concepción, San Pedro, and Amambay; namely, the northeastern part of the country. Its political structures are Marxist-Leninist, but its actions closely resemble those employed by the Uruguayans and Argentin- ean anarchist robbers who were active in the late 80s and early 90s. Many of these historical armed organizations can teach us certain things relevant to our interests. We do not assent to the moral judgment that states that we must ignore these organizations because of their intentions. We do not share any of these moral im- pulses, of course. Eco-extremists and nihilist terrorists are not anti-authoritarian anarchists; we are not anti-fascists who would refuse the lessons left by these armed groups. It is clear that we do not share their doctrines, but not sharing their intentions does not mean that we ne- glect the lessons that they have left us. We follow in their footsteps with a criminal spirit to satisfy our Egoist goals. Valuable things can be learned from both the left-wing and right-wing armed groups, and we have no moral problems admitting this. We have more than once vindicated ourselves with a marked tendency toward the anti-political and anti-ideological.

Robberies and kidnapping As with the anarchist bandits, the EPP commits robberies and claims responsibility for them directly and indirectly. They have also been known to take responsibility for kidnappings. Notably, in 1997, they assaulted a bank in Chore, San Pedro. Although the robbery was botched, it gave them good experience that helped them improve their abilities to carry out what they term “expropriations.” Among the most notable kidnappings was that of the rancher and logging company owner Alberto Lindston in July 2008, whose ransom was set at 130,000 dollars. They released the man after the

111 ransom was paid, but threatened him with death if he continued his activities. Lindstron ignored their warnings and, in May 2013, the group assassinated him. The same fate befell Cecilia Cubas, daughter of former presi- dent Raul Cubas. She was kidnapped during a fierce shoot-out in 2004 and later found dead in 2005, an event that shook the Para- guayan nation. Other notable kidnappings were those of the cattleman Fi- del Zavala in 2009 and Arlan Fick, son of a wealthy landowner, in 2014. These acts were reported by the national media, and popular support or contempt was communicated by many members of the populace. The EPP received this support in spite of the media branding them as criminals, not the revolutionaries that they as- pired to be. The group thus was etched into the collective mind of Paraguayan society. It achieved fame among the masses, and also obtained a national political and military profile in that country. The EPP’s initial strategy of first making money to buy weapons, vehicles, houses and, in general, develop war logistics, rather than starting with political-military operations, is highly intelligent, and reminds us of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda from the Islamic Magreb led by the fiery Mokhtak Belmokhtar who kidnapf Europeans and Americans to self-finance and give continuity to their war against the West.

Organization and Discretion The organization of the EPP is similar to the so-called informal- ity of the insurrectionary anarchists, although it is not the same, of course. The EPP cells are very small groups of a few guerrillas each who keep their composure very well, do not attract attention to themselves, and are quite distrustful. The different cells are not known to each other, so infiltration of them is a very difficult. The cells follow orders that are given through the public communiques of the organization. Although it is known that the members of the EPP number around five hundred, in their relatively short history they have had few political prisoners although some of the prisoners of the EPP were detained for their political past in the Partido Patria Libre, and

112 some of them have been imprisoned after clashes with the police or the army. This is what happened in April, 2010, in the department of Alto Paraguay (extreme north of the country), when an EPP guerrilla, Severiano Martínez, engaged in a firefight with a police officer who had tried to frisk him. Martínez was wounded but escaped and hid in the jungle. The confrontation led to a furious hunt by the authorities against members of the EPP in the wild lands of the mountains of the Paraguayan Chaco. Apparently, some cells of the EPP alerted each other of this event and new clashes broke out that same month in the department of Concepcion, where a total of four policemen were reported killed. In July of that year, Martínez, injured and with a brain infec- tion after the April shoot out, was found by police and shot down, though not without first unloading his 9mm gun at them. As a result, upon discovering the identity of the guerrilla, the police began to investigate his close circle, searched his house and found information on other EPP leaders on his computer. By September of that year, two senior members of the armed group would end up murdered, others had to go underground as their faces were broad- cast in all media. Whether or not they had to anything do with the organization, the issue for the government was to make everyone believe that they had actually sent EPP members to prison, to not appear ridiculous before the media.

Military Action Although the EPP suffered the aforementioned setback, it appears that the security and double life they lead is so effective that the controversial Wikileaks group leaked that in 2010, the Paraguayan government asked the major US intelligence agencies for permission to use high-level technology to spy on drug trafficking phones against the EPP, which, up until now has not yielded any results. In September 2011, just one year after the authorities celebrat- ed the death of EPP leaders and ordered the capture of others, the group mounted another surprise attack on a police station, where two policemen were killed (one of them was shot more than ten times), proving that the EPP was still active.

113 To date, sixty deaths among military, police, businessmen, and civilians have been attributed to the EPP, most of them for con- tinuing to plant Monsanto’s soybeans and corn, and for the use of harmful agrochemicals that had been prohibited by the group in the areas where it has presence. The last military action of the armed group was at the end of August, 2016, when EPP detonated an explosive against a military vehicle. They killed eight soldiers in this attack. The government promised to find those responsible, but so far there has been no arrest.

Lessons From the history of the EPP several lessons can be learnt by the eco-extremists and nihilist terrorists: a) It is highly recommended to be cautious, have a closed group, and act only with them or alone. Do not waste your time recruiting others who you don’t know into your close circle. The EPP is an example of discretion because not even the surveillance programs of the FBI have been able to dismantle the organization. b) The number of members of a group does not matter if the attacks they make are direct and accurate. The EPP teaches that it is not necessary to have an entire army (although they call themselves an army), or to have a large number of armed men. Murdering a person always captures media attention and, depending on the objective, can create a local controversy (such as the employee of the UNAM chemistry faculty who was killed by ITS in June 2016), or international controversy (such as the biotechnology expert killed by ITS in November 2011). A murder can be committed by a person with a simple knife; firearms or a large number of combatants are not necessary. c) It is not recommended to store information about members of the group that could be found by the police. If you have this type of information, if you are arrested and the police search your house, you can blow their cover and the police can find and arrest more cell members. In other words, DO NOT make the same mistake as Severiano Martínez. d) It is recommended to have a source of money to finance attacks,

114 whether working or doing robberies. This depends on the conditions developed by the individualists interested in the war against civilization. Ajajema 1

115 Letter to an Optimist

116 You may not read me. Maybe one day you will see my body on the front page of the newspaper, lying in a pool of blood, unable to let out a last cry. But what do you care, what is it to you that I exist? Or maybe I am just a weird stranger who is discomforting, like a small pebble in your shoe. Maybe the fake incendiary device that I placed outside the nightclub you frequent bothered you. Maybe you didn’t even hear about it. And maybe you never found out about the bombs we placed at the churches your mother and grandmother frequent. And that’s not even mentioning the package bomb we sent to an entrepreneur of biotechnology products who you want to imitate. You continue as queen of your own world in which you carry on with pretenses of being the only ruler. In this world of the eternal smile, liquor, and expensive perfumes, I write with profound hatred for one who would surely offer me only hatred in return. On this earth that is already lost, you still have that impeccable smile. The wind makes your hair dance about. For you the wind is an instrument of beauty but I only catch the scent of something soaked in toxic chemicals. It would be useless to wait for your smile to disappear since your appearance does its job. This is a world filled with smiles, to which you send a clear message: Long live freedom! Enchained, they go crying the magic word at every moment, the healing word. I write to you, optimist, who finds herself under the deep spell of existence. You feel freedom and it created for you a supposed love of life, for the act of living every time that light hits your body, inhaling, ingesting, to the point of staggering. The spell of existence, the greatest orgasm being the feeling that the world belongs to you and like a good lackey it offers to you its many nectars, the most complex creations of man are offered to you, and you receive them with joy. The tarnish of the grave and of autumn will never reach you. For you it is always spring that ends in summer only to pro- ceed directly to spring again. I am the cruel voice of winter, the last danse macabre that you don’t want to see. Your life as an optimist is a veil of many colors and a rejection of the gray. You buy the most expensive contraptions to fend off the pain of living. What gives your life meaning, optimist?

117 Your life would be meaningless if the appearance collapsed, but it is indestructible. This is the lamentable human condition. You will live under its saving cloak until your dying days. How human it is for you and I to live a lie. Our beliefs are only a lightshow that points to nothing. Considering the present, why is it so difficult to abandon oneself? You cling to life, optimist. You show yourself in many forms, on some occasions to subject yourself strongly to the beautiful world to come, in which all injustice and horrible events will end. On other occasions you show yourself to be a pursuer of the success that is much coveted in our time. Op- timist, the past has been blurred in your mind and the future will come to comfort you. You know that a beautiful tomorrow awaits you and/or condemned humanity. You are indifferent to my words, you reject them without a second thought. What is it to you that for many moons I have expected nothing from humanity, that some time ago my life has become a frustrated desire to leave this appearance that they call reality. I know that this isn’t a dream, it’s something else—or that’s what I want to believe. Our words will never mix, optimist, they will never dance together, even if our bodies might bump into each other on the street. When I have the chance, I will betray you. Go on smiling with your pearly whites at this defeated pessimist, but don’t let your guard down, optimist. And when your existence is flooded with the blood of your dreams, always remember this: De- spair is more dangerous than hope.

Jeremías Torres Torreón July 2017

118 119 Weak Words Concerning Human Reasoning

120

I walked absorbed under the dark starry sky. I seek something beautiful that, after much time, has been hidden inside of me. My feet touch the earth and I lose myself in it. Little by little, entering the unknowable, I come to what appears to be a forest, though the image of what a forest is doesn’t exist for me anymore, so I have decided to ignore it. I advance feeling the crush of the branches as they break under my feet. And I ask myself: What are branches? I know that they are looking for me, but I left a long time ago. Now only the memory of what-I-once-was remains, but the past is dead. I forget my thoughts and appear in a clearly magical spot in that beautiful place. Non-human sounds resound around me, a dense fog covers the space in which I exist, erasing my image forever. My words almost make me disappear in writing those para- graphs above. For, in treating a theme as immense and overwhelm- ing as human reason, words show themselves to be paltry evidence. It occurs to me that the primary reason that our detractors continue to fail to comprehend what eco-extremism is all about and what we seek, is that they still think of eco-extremism as something essentially political. This is understandable, since eco-extremism is derived from ideologies that are effectively political, and it still maintains an aes- thetic in some ways similar to the political. It is understandable that those who study this phenomenon find it so strange and incomprehensible that people with complex and “rational” visions or reflections about the world around them carry out attacks and eliminate human lives. These opinions converge on one unified center, born from the incredibly unreliable human mind in all of its confusion. We know that eco-extremism comes out of an ephemeral and weak mentality, and to a certain point, its essence attacks itself. The eco-extremist reasons concerning the urgency of rejecting reason itself; he speaks of the harmfulness of language and attacks his own species and the technological and artificial order that gave him life. His eco-extremism leads him to conceive of eco-extremism itself as an immense contradiction, as a final crash among the essences

121 that converge in the limit of our understanding. We walk on that limit, we play on it, and we trace out our history among overflow- ing leaps of passion and insanity. That mysterious limit presents itself to us as the Hidden or the Unknowable: all of those processes of nature that surround us and that we cannot comprehend, or that we no longer care to conceive of in the form that was taught to us. Speaking for myself in particular, some time ago I stopped considering science’s opinion on any given thing. For example, I have never thought of what goes on beyond the stars and for that reason I have decided no longer to speak of it. To speak of other planets, other galaxies, black holes, or anti-matter is absurd for me. That’s not what I see when I look up at the sky and that’s why I don’t consider it valid. This is the same with all of the phenomena that occur in my daily life and that I refuse to interpret according to received scientific logic. Thus, what I see when I lift my eyes to the heavens, I decodify in an ineludible way, as the unknowable. In the same way, my ears have become deaf to the scientific explanations of modern humans. I respect the beautiful catastrophes that constantly eclipse the routine existence of modern humans. When a tsunami indiscriminately hits a region, I see the wild un- leashing its vengeance against that which is foreign to it. I see one being (the wave), a passing and ferocious manifestation of wild nature, suddenly surging, striking with immense force and giving all of itself, leaving itself empty to disappear into the immensity again. It is thus not difficult to understand the empathy that exists between the eco-extremists and natural catastrophes. In executing one of our acts, we empty out our lives and give ourselves in the moment to a superior force that governs us. Before every attack we leave with the certainty that it is possible that we won’t come back, but assume with calm that “the die is cast,” that what has to happen will happen, and “if death comes we will continue destroying things in Hell.” The precious moments when I am able to separate myself from the terrestrial plain to put my existence in perspective are few and far between. In those moments I realize how insignificant for the whole, this simple defective expression of “life” is. This is the experience of an end that should not be feared but rather fully embraced. 122 These are the moments in which my being is able to express itself in totality, to unfold itself in the attack without thinking of the consequences, to convert itself into a wild animal without hesitation. I was thinking of elaborating further in this essay, addressing the most complex subject of human reason, but I will leave that to someone else. It seems to me adequate and more practical to sum- marize my thoughts in the following way: The eco-extremist in his process of re-wilding, now has the option of rejecting civilized reason, without leaving aside a frontal attack on the enemy. He must reject the false truths described by the scientists and research- ers. He must develop his own visions, learned from direct contact with wild nature experienced in solitude or with those of affinity. He must learn to conceive of the universe from our animal being, abandoning the perspectives of the modern hyper-civilized human. We must understand ourselves as just another force within the immense compendium of forces working in a mysterious and incomprehensible manner. Being animals in the now, waging our own suicidal war against all that is against us, all that aims at our domestication. We should renounce the obligation to be bound into schemes that obligate us to ask for the reason behind things, and in this way try to flatten the immensity of unknown phenomena. We must refuse to limit and imprison ourselves in deformed and defective knowable human concepts. And now I am going to prepare myself for the next attack, to be ready for the next instant when I cease to be a civilized human, even if just for a moment. In that moment I feel as if the power of the unknowable works through me and guides my shaking hands, whether I place an explosive or start a fire. How it illuminates the path that leads me to my target, and then covers my tracks under the mantle of the hidden, as has happened many times now in the past. I leave for the next moment that I experiment far from their disgusting cities, far from the glare of that machine that hurts my eyes when I write these words, returning to what I once was, giving life to a mystery that exists resting in some remote corner of my being, which I encountered for the first time by accident upon finding myself walking, absorbed under the dark starry sky. Huazihul

123 At-Tux

124

I thought I would die on the battlefield fighting you white soldiers. You white people have driven me from mountain to mountain, from valley to valley, like we do the wounded deer. At last you have got me here. I see but a few days more ahead of me. Captain Jack, during his testimony

The word “out-law” at one time pertained to a person outside the protection of the law; these individuals could be killed with impu- nity as they had incurred expulsion from the civilized world and its protective embrace. They were homo sacer, the banished man, the cursed man, the body that could be killed but was not fit for holy ritual. We imagine these rogues to be gallivanting around in Sher- wood Forest with Robin Hood, or stalking stage coaches in the brush along a rutted road with Dick Turpin. The inherent element of an outlaw is the notion of an “out-side,” some place away from the mental and physical safety of walls and doors, and the pointed palisades of a frontier fort. An escape. An out. In June of 1846 the treaty of Washington was signed by Great Britain and the US, ceding “all western North American lands south of the 49th parallel of north latitude” to the US (Landrum 4). This was also the year that the Mexican-American war began. Two years later the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the US government rule over the formerly-Mexican lands from the 42nd parallel south to the current-day border of southern California. These two treaties effectively carved out the shape of the modern US. The newly-opened land ushered waves of settlers and migrants from the East and brought them west in search of ranch holdings, agricultural land, and economic opportunities. In 1846 was the establishment of the Applegate Trail, a spur of the 2,170-mile-long Oregon trail. The Applegate Trail’s purpose was to bring migrants into the fertile Willamette valley by way of Klamath Lake, through the homeland of the Modoc and Klamath tribes whose territory straddled the California-Oregon border. Hostilities between the Modoc and whites began with the first parties of travelers. Angered by a smallpox epidemic brought

125 on by the settlers, the Modoc began sporadically raiding wagon trains passing through their territory. In 1852 a wagon train of sixty five men, women, and children heading north between the Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes was attacked by the Modoc under a leader named Old Schonchin. The attack left only three survivors—one man and two young girls—effectively stemming the flow of immigrants and closing the trail (Brady 230). Prompted by the raid, a civilian militia led by Ben Wright set out from Yreka, California bent on revenge. They lured the Modoc into a trap with promises of parlay, and when the tribe had gathered, Ben Wright and his mob slaughtered over forty of the natives. Although scattered raiding continued through the 1860s, the event shook the Modoc. They began to cut their hair, took western nicknames, and adopted western clothing. A chief named Kientpoos became known as Captain Jack (Highberger 8). In 1863 the Modoc tribe agreed to move to the Klamath Res- ervation. The relationship between the Klamath tribe and the Mo- doc soured, and the smaller Modoc groups desired to be moved to their own reservation. Despite repeated requests for such a move, the Modoc were ignored by the Klamath Indian Agents. Two bands decided to leave the Klamath reservation and return to their tribal lands around the Lost River area (Brady 232). The Hot Creek Modoc, led by Shacknasty Jim, Hooker Jim, and Curly-Headed Doctor, camped on the east bank of the Lost River; the Lost River band led by Captain Jack camped on the west bank. After almost two years of complaints from settlers living around the native encampments, the military decided to force the bands to return to the reservation. On the morning of November 29, 1872 an army force of some forty troopers surrounded Captain Jack’s encampment, demanding that they surrender their weapons and return to the reservation. After a brief exchange and a refusal to give up their weapons, the Modoc and the soldiers began shoot- ing at each other. At the same time, on the other side of the river, an ad-hoc citizen militia attacked Hooker Jim’s camp. Both the soldiers and the citizens were bested and both pulled back. Captain Jack’s Modoc retreated to the nearby Klamath Lava Beds, a location from which they had boasted that they could “whip one thousand

126 soldiers” (Highberger 16). Hooker Jim and his band of warriors went on the warpath, killing fourteen male settlers they met on their way to the rocks to meet up with the other band (Landrum 7). The renegade Modoc found themselves in the lava beds with fifty warriors and one hundred fifty women and children. These lava beds are a rocky tangle of volcanic debris that is eight miles wide and four miles long, the impenetrable heart of which would become known as Captain Jack’s Stronghold. Captain Lydecker of the US Engineers, who was involved in the mapping of the area, wrote that the lava beds are “a perfect network of obstructions, admirably adapted to a defense by an active enemy; they seldom rise to a height of ten feet above the bed, and are, as a rule, split open, at the top, giving thus continuous cover along their crests” (Brady 284). Five companies of soldiers and three companies of Oregon and California volunteers, confident of a quick victory, marched into the lava beds on the morning of January 17, 1873 (Landrum 9). Over the course of the day the soldiers hardly caught a glimpse of their elusive enemy and returned to their camp in the evening with shredded uniforms and torn up boots, having suffered nine dead and thirty wounded (Brady 237). This began several months of intermittent skirmishing. Major J.G. Trimble reminisced about the rough terrain: No wonder then that they should be defeated where every step was ob- structed by blocks of slippery lava the size of houses, and pits or pot-holes the depth of mining-shafts: where the foe could fire from the right, the left, above and below. Even subterranean passages, leading from cave to cave, fa- cilitated attack and rendered retreat a certainty. The only counterpart to such a battle-ground in the annals of our Indian fighting was the Everglades of Florida, and there the forces were equally stubborn and alert. (Brady 284) Peace talks began in early spring. Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby, the commanding general of the Military Depart- ment of the Columbia, assured Captain Jack that no Modoc would be harmed if they would surrender. It was agreed that both sides would meet, unarmed, to discuss the terms of peace on April 11, at a tent erected between the army encampment and the lava beds. The night before the meeting the Modoc warriors pressured Cap- tain Jack into agreeing to assassinate the peace commissioners the

127 following day. The next morning General Canby and three members of the peace commission, Reverend Doctor Eleazar Thomas, Leroy Dyar, and Alfred Meacham (the former Indian Affairs Superintendent), along with a Modoc translator named Toby Riddle and her husband Frank Riddle, met six Modoc at the tent: Ellen’s Man, Black Jim, Schonchin John, Shacknasty Jim, Hooker Jim, and Captain Jack (Highberger 24). After an hour of smoking cigars and discussion, two Modoc, Barncho and Slolux, appeared from the rocks carrying rifles. Cap- tain Jack said “At-tux!” (all ready!) and he shoved his pistol in Gen- eral Canby’s face. The first shot from the pistol misfired, but before the general could get away, Captain Jack re-cocked the gun and shot him again under the eye. Each Modoc had an intended target. As Jack shot the general, Boston Charly shot the Reverend Dr. Thomas through the chest several times until he died. Schonchin John shot Meacham (Brady, 245). Hooker Jim went for Dyer and Riddle, but Dyer fired at him with his single-shot pocket Derringer and the two succeeded in escaping (Highberger 25). The warriors returned to the tent, stripped the clothing from Canby, Thomas, and Meacham, then fled back to the protection of the rocks. At the same time on the east side of the stronghold several Modoc came out from their cover and asked for a parlay with officers from the camp of Major Edwin C. Mason. Instead of the major, two lieutenants walked out to receive the Modoc; when the officers were within range the warriors opened fire and wounded one of the officers in the leg. The Lieutenant would die three days later from his injuries (Landrum 11). The military response to the murder of the general and peace commissioners was swift and intense. Faced with artillery barrag- es and a military force prepared to more effectively navigate the stronghold, the Modoc fled the lava rocks and pushed out into the surrounding sagebrush plains. The group divided into two bands, one lead by Captain Jack and the other by Hooker Jim. On May 22, the Hot Creek band and Hooker Jim were surrounded and captured by the army. They agreed to lead the army to the renegades under Captain Jack in exchange for exoneration (Brady 251). On

128 June 1, 1873, after running from the army and the US calvary, Cap- tain Jack was captured with two other warriors, five women, and seven children. He is reported to have said, “Jack’s legs gave out. I am ready to die.” (Highberger 35). Six Modoc were tried without council and found guilty of the murder of the peace commission. Barncho and Slolux were sentenced to life imprisonment on Alcatraz Island. Captain Jack, Black Jim, Schonchin John, and Boston Charly were hanged at Fort Klamath on October 3, 1873 at 10:15 a.m. (Landrum 74). A reporter wrote, “Captain Jack and Black Jim never moved a muscle and died without a struggle. Schonchin and Boston Charley died hard.” (Highberger 37). The remaining Modoc were moved to a reservation in Oklahoma. The terms “outlaw” and “renegade” are often used to describe the participants of the Modoc rebellion. They chose to go against the social norms that they had partially adapted. They wore the but- ton-up shirts and pants of settlers but still remembered a time without the humiliation of reservation life. Their names were known by the white community before they left the Klamath Reservation for the Lost River Area; some members spoke perfect English and some of those killed during Hooker Jim’s rampaging on November 29 were neighbors and even friends of the raiding party. These were not so much hostile aliens attacking a world they didn’t want to engage with, as frustrated and enraged participants who had tried to play nice but had had enough. The Modoc used tactics that were practical and effective for their situation. Elements of surprise and deceit allowed a small band, one that was a fraction of the size of the opposing group, to gain the upper hand in a situation that would have otherwise offered no contest. In the end, they desired to be on their homeland, and it was their knowledge of its geography that gave them a fortress and allowed the band of fifty warriors to enact the costliest per-capita war the US military has ever engaged in. Captain Jack’s Stronghold represents a place and time when escape was still possible. An individual could attack, then move to a place of safety, a geographic area ungoverned and unreachable by the those who didn’t know it. A band could defend against

129 unwanted pursuers with a well-aimed arrow, the dislodging of a large boulder, or a bullet fired from behind rocky cover. In these circumstances, the environment took on the almost mythical role of participant, and the pursuers could feel as though the whole world was literally against them. In today’s hyper-technological reality, escape, the safety of a stronghold can only be realized through meticulous planning and execution. The outlaws of today find refuge in the wiping of shell casings, the disposal of clothing, the knowledge of CCTV camera locations, the laundering of money. There are no caves imperme- able to bunker busters; no deserts too remote for predator drones; no towns without vigilantes; no swamp steamy enough to trick thermal cameras. Even so, there are still those beyond the palisades.

D.G.

Bibliography

Brady, Cyrus Townsend. Northwestern Fights and Fighters. The Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1907. Highberger, Mark. The Story of the Modoc War of 1873. Bear Creek Press, 2001. Landrum, Francis. Guardhouse, Gallows, and Graves. Klamath County Museum, 1988.

130 131 “No Such Thing as Life without Bloodshed...” —or— the force of tragedy in anti-humanist politics

132

Tragedy is a product of Indo-European culture. Those cultures spanning Vedic philosophy to Celtic poetry, Norse artwork and Roman legions—all originated on the vast grasslands of the Eur- asian steppe: those men and women who first tamed horses and made chariots. Their legacy to our dying mythology runs from the figures of the Sky-father and the Fertile Goddess, a birth of a world from the murder of one brother by another, and the worship of the Bull. Indo-European peoples spawned the civilisations that came to conquer most of the world and still echo in the globalised Empire today. But this essay is about one specific world-view they invented and passed on, the tragic world-view. Tragedy is a force, a narrative device, a philosophy, an art form, a framing of action. Tragedy is the fatal flaw in the hero that brings about his demise. Tragedy is the best of intentions, the law of unintended consequences. Tragedy hides under the glossy sheen of progress. The origination of tragedy as a play begins with the Greeks in the Attic Tragedies. Plays like Oedipus and Antigone, in which the protagonist cannot escape fate and realises reality too late, that show a horrified pleading face to an indifferent pantheon of gods. Loss and grief, death of family members and loved ones are grist to the mill of the Attic playwrights. It is here that Nietzsche identifies the dualistic forces at work in Greek art—the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Like Nietzsche, our focus should be on the Dionysian. Dionysus is the god of wine, revelry and wildness. The later Byzantines defined him thus:So named from accomplishing ‘Diony- ian’ for each of those who live the wild life. Or from providing ‘Dionyion’, everything for those who live the wild life Dionysus is a complex god, famed for cruelty, wild abandon, sadism, alcohol, ecstasy—primitive, disturbing and dark. He encourages his followers to engage in intoxicating rituals replete with wine, blood, and sex. His is a fearful domain which should be tamed, as the Athenian rulers did to his followers in the end. But Dionysus plays the crucial role in the development of tragedy—the play de- velops from the ritual sacrifice of a goat or bull with the emphasis that its resurrection. This is brought onto the stage where Dionysus

133 is always murdered and revived and the chorus sings the wails and songs that draw the audience out of themselves and into a world of undifferentiated ecstatic madness. Nietzsche sees in this the root of tragedy, that for development there is death, specifically the death of the wild and natural, for whom Dionysus is the embodiment. This is the root of human culture. A god who dies and is resurrected… this motif exists in almost all Indo-European religions and some scholars speculate it originates in the near-death experiences of Palaeolithic shamans. The Hanging God can be found all over, most famously in the form of Viking Odin screaming for his runes while hung from a tree. But it took the Indo-Europeans to define the act of murdering the god as necessary to survive. This tragedy, this bloodshed, is thought to align itself with the agricultural world-view of the Neolithic. Farming by its very nature undermines itself; famine and plague always stalk the farmer. The oldest Vedic texts deal with this explicitly; compare the Mahabharata with Othello and Seneca and observe the well of misery that agriculture has brought us. To kill a God is unnatural, to farm the land is unnatural. Nietzsche points out the reality for the Greek world-view: an offence against the Gods is the foundation of human life, hence our deep connection between tragedy and farming. Knowledge of the world requires bloodshed and will always result in death. The more you force the world into an unnatural shape, the more suffering you will reap. Tragedy has the peculiar quality that surfaces when cultures and civilisations are succeeding: Elizabethan England, Imperial Rome, Athenian hegemony. It would seem that as progress is made, the underbelly of tragedy accompanies it everywhere, like a grin in the dark. If this is the case—that tragedy is the prodigal son of progress—then we should embrace it with open arms. If tragedy is the result of forbidden knowledge, then let us be its agents. Capitalism is an essentially tragic existence, a never-ending, ever-increasing cycle of boom, consume, and bust. This darkly comic system has brought us and the world to its knees, and for those who have been fashioned in its negative image, the bleak reality—there we find tragedy. The more that humanistic ideology tries to save people, the more it kills. Consider the Green Revolution, the Nobel Peace

134 Prize, and the millions of lives saved. The backfire is coming; like a tidal wave from the deep it will arise, the rust on the gloss of progress. This is why we need to embrace tragedy in our anti-humanism. We reject the outlook of saving the world’s people and their societies and their comforts. We reject the solutions, which bring nothing but devastation—the poisoned chalice of progressive politics. Life cannot exist without blood and to try to create a new human will result in ever more. Humans are flawed and human nature cannot be improved upon. This lunatic fantasy of the Left— in which humans are perfectible—has spread its ugly tentacles into Silicon Valley and the sci-fi horrors of trans-humanism. Make no mistake that trans-human politics is a serious force in modern discourse. But we should recognise it for what it is—an offence against the Gods, against the world, the prefiguring of tragedy. For such an offence to bring knowledge, it will also bring death. This is the gift of modern science, of agriculture, of every so-called gift of civilisation, snatched from the world through violence. We are not the rational keepers of arcane knowledge, we are the blundering primates who think too highly of ourselves. Tragedy is the force that keeps us in our proper lineage and we should take up its call. Let us be tragic figures, let us be the prefiguring of the end of -ci vilisation. Let us be modern tragedians.

Magpie

135 Reflections on Freedom

136 In this text, I propose to develop my vision of freedom from the eco-extremist perspective. My motivation to write this arises from how ambiguous the concept of freedom is, how it is frequently used in many discourses without ever being truly defined. For this reason, what is produced in these works is rather nebulous, and they never quite arrive at what they seek when they mention “freedom.” I am not interested in a dictionary definition of the term, nor in discussing what the the average citizen might think of the concept, as this not directed to them; this is directed to anyone in search of a clearer and realistic interpretation of the world around them, and I express this as a point of debate, not a declaration. Some would indicate that freedom involves a negative concept, in which one is not “free for” (a positive interpretation), but rather one is “free from:” free from authority, free from oppression, free from domination, etc. The more astute or less confused see the term more positively: freedom to develop oneself, freedom to act, etc. An anarchist could be regarded as seeking freedom by engaging in a war against the state and authority, which prevent free development and self-determination, while a person of the anti-civilization position might say that the only thing one can aspire to in this world is one’s individual freedom. Neither one is being clear about what they truly seek or desire. In a world without the state or authority, the human, like all other living creatures, is driven by many factors that limit their free development. In our present reality, to realize a vague concept such as “personal freedom” is frankly impossible. You can go off to try to live in the wild, carve your spear, sharpen your senses, hunt and gather your own food. You can try all of that, and assuming you can pull it off, you won’t have to wait long before the environment is invaded by machines and the inert gray of civilization. First one could argue that one’s environmental conditions do not restrict one’s freedom, but rather mold one’s reality in a certain manner. We will discuss this with more attention below. One of the principal reasons why anarchists detest the state and authority is that these institutions deprive many from pursuing the same opportunities as other people. In a world in which these

137 diabolical entities did not exist, it is very difficult if not impossible to think that any situation would present the same possibilities for all. A group of humans living in a tropical environment would clearly have an advantage in the gathering of fruits, and access to a greater variety, while another group in more austere environments would necessarily have greater recourse to hunting or fishing as a larger share of their sustenance. Conditions impose themselves on you, there is no “freedom” in this (I will discuss this further later on). Another practical example is diet. Many anarchists believe that they are pursuing a coherent and ethical path in practicing vegan- ism, since they consider it part of their exercise of freedom. Namely, choosing one’s diet and at the same time realizing this over the freedom of others. In wild nature, no animal can choose its diet since it depends on the environment. Civilization needs to get some benefit out of all of our activities. If we sustained ourselves only from what our immediate environment offered us, this would not be worthwhile for it. That is why new and stranger fads emerge in terms of diet, with so many rules, so that we can choose the diet that most fits our “individual aspirations” (which are really induced from without). Certainly many will find it difficult to dispel the illusion that is being discussed here, but let us think about it. We cannot decide vi- tally important things in this sense. We cannot decide if we want to consume truly organic food, free of toxic chemicals, or if we want to drink clean water. But sure, we can choose the “paleo diet,” we can choose to be vegans, or to eat only raw foods. Is having a ton of false choices (false in the sense that if we really wanted a natural option we could choose none of them) really more valuable than being able to choose an actual natural option? Secondly, referring to individual freedom, maybe one could say that being able to choose a certain path means possessing a certain freedom. That seems like an interesting point. Firstly because in this case, freedom becomes something rather abstract, as someone who declares themselves conscious of their decisions could claim to be free. This declaration is refuted by the fact that we live in a civilized environment. We are exposed daily to an infinite number of senso- ry stimuli that profoundly affect our perception of reality. One can

138 believe that one is forging their own path, but in reality upbringing and environment have determined one’s path in this or that direction. Even the most de-constructed anarchist will find himself ob- ligated to admit the extent that civilized frameworks have cleaved to his being. If he doesn’t, he’s an idiot. And this isn’t even mentioning us eco-extremists (though perhaps I am only speaking for myself here): I have no problem admitting that I am a modern and civilized human, profoundly domesticated and separated from my true animality. I am not free at all. Even eco-extremism, as Halputta Hadjo has indicated, is a product of its environment, namely, a hostile one, sick, and immersed in artificiality. This is the environment that pushes us toward confrontation, since we listen to the call of our instincts and our ancestral roots. Inside civilization, to speak of individual freedom seems meaningless. We can’t even remove ourselves freely from it in a physical sense, not to mention mentally. But even outside of civilization, considering a scenario in which civilization collapses, these concepts would not be practical. No animal moves about in total freedom. Falcons can’t explore underwater caves, polar bears can’t live in tropical environments, and so on. And mentally speaking, speaking on an abstract and subjective level, it’s also not possible. I will point out one example. A bonobo born into a family of bonobos is accustomed from birth to feed on fruits and insects while living an active life in a tropical environment. That’s the only option it was given, no other option is available. Perhaps if it tried another type of food, its tastes would have changed. It’s possible that it would rather have lived in a hotter (or colder) climate. One will never know. Take another example: wolves lived for thousands of years in a wild manner in a great variety of environments. At some point, wolves began to encounter humans. They lay by the heat of human fire, and experienced the comfort of receiving food without having to hunt it themselves. And that caused many of them to stay around humans. Little by little, they lost their wildness and became domesticated animals. Here the reader can arrive at an opinion. We could think that wolves, in renouncing life in the wild, subjugated themselves to the slavery of domestication. But it is certain that they didn’t have freedom to make this decision. Living a violent

139 life, often going without, and having to struggle mightily to survive, how could anyone consider that freedom? Wolves made their decisions between two options that presented themselves. They opted for one and not the other. There can’t be a real objection if someone said that this decision gave those wolves a type of freedom that life in the wild could not give them. Another point I would like to pursue concerns animal and earth “liberation.” First, is removing an animal from a physical cage necessarily giving it freedom? The options are limited in this regard. You could always bring it to a vegan sanctuary in which it will have a limited amount of space to run around, and depend on the schedule of humans in order to eat or run about. Here in the majority of cases it will have to live with many other animals in a crowded space, in a very unnatural way. It will have to feed on industrial garbage given by the hands of some human. Anyone can see that if freedom actually existed, it wouldn’t be this. Another option for this “rescued” being would be abandon- ment in some remnant of wild nature that still exists. That animal may have been ripped from its natural environment from the first moments of its life, or may have been born in an artificial environment, and thus would not know at all the natural environment in which it should have been brought up. It would lack the tools necessary to survive on its own in wild nature. It probably would not survive one night out there. At the very least, it would probably be severely wounded and scarred for the rest of its life. But let’s say it does survive for some time, adapting to its environment from having been a domesticated animal, and recovering from its wounds. Even if it becomes feral, it will not live in freedom in wild nature, because there freedom is irrelevant on the theoretical and practical level. Regarding “Earth liberation,” there is not much to say. It seems a rather delusional leftist concept. The Earth doesn’t need a group of humans to come and give it back its lost “liberation.” If in this ephemeral moment it is putting up with and giving shelter to human trash on its surface, that doesn’t mean that it won’t make them suffer the consequences down the road. The human sinks further

140 into misery. Humans have been disrespectful with the Earth for too long, and the Earth itself will erase all trace of civilization, whether soon or later really doesn’t matter. Also, the Earth doesn’t need freedom, it only needs to be and to develop in its cycles and processes like it has through its history. I ask myself, what would make the Earth freer? The fall of civilization? A more responsible use of “resources”? Human extinction? I believe that different people could have various observations on this, but the whole concept, aside from being false and leftist, is extremely subjective. No serious analysis of reality could come from this. The central point of this essay is that freedom does not exist. To this I will counterpose, as a concept and practice, wild nature. As I said previously, it is mostly your environment that determines your path. No animal decides how their life will be, nor where it will occur. All of these conditions are imposed on them from birth. This idea of freedom has only arisen with the civilized human, in his immense confusion that pretends to be “reasoning” and “intelligent:” the only animal that has transformed its vital experience to the point that it believes that it can opt for one determined way of life or another, all justified by the abstract and harmful concept of freedom. Human confusion expresses its weakness at this extreme point. We have constructed an immense barrier between ourselves and the natural world. The majority of humans fear all that hides, crawls, flies, creeps, or runs outside the concrete walls that surround their cities. From here comes the insatiable search of civilization to design the most comfortable cage possible in which individuals can gather with tranquility, without making too much of a scene. Failure is inevitable. You can’t simply take a group of animals that lived in one way for thousands of years, throw them in a cage and expect that they will develop in a healthy and full way. Nature has already given us our place in the game, it is not a central role, it is not of vital importance to anyone or anything. It is only one piece within a great compendium of other pieces, useful but dis- pensable. This is our role, and this is how it is because it fits together symbiotically with all that surrounds us, and this is how things have developed through the centuries. It doesn’t matter how many

141 scientists and eggheads doing cold calculations and having technical insights to come up with the best healthy environment. Things simply don’t work that way. We need to walk around barefoot, not to have the finest shoes that adapt to the shape of the ground. We need an active life, not nice gyms to exercise. We need contact with gods and spirits that inhabit the whole surface of the Earth, and all the logic in the world could never satiate that need. Nature is that which is for itself, as has been stated previously. It does not need a purpose, it does not need to explain itself. It does not need reasons. Our civilized mentality tries to find the reasons for everything; we play at being the lords and masters of existence, ignoring that we are merely minor actors playing a historical role within this ephemeral and overvalued experience known as life. We will never be anything but a flicker that lasted only a few seconds, only to submerge itself back into the darkness of the infinite. We deny our role in this game, we bathe in illusions, and we forget the truth. Eco-extremism is only the belief in a natural order or chaos, however you would like to put it. We obey it without any reproach on our part. All animals know from the moment of their birth the path that they must pursue. They don’t think about it, they act through instinct, as a simple robot follows the commands of a computer. Instinct influences, as does the contemplation of the environment, the proof of direct experience, the teaching of elders, among other factors. At this point, really it doesn’t matter if monkeys are able to build buildings; they would never do something so stupid. The human attacks itself constantly since it denies its own nature and from the beginning of civilization until now, no intelligent or sensible human act has been recorded. The fact that they can do certain things and have the capacity to carry them out does not mean that any of these things were either necessary or important. The lie of civilization has taken control of the weak minds of those animals, now imprisoned and on the brink of extinction, since they perverted their environment and nature to try to overcome themselves. This lie takes on a special role in the minds of those who believe that they are in opposition to this torturous reality. Those who take up the values of civilization that they are most “comfortable” with, and they try to create scenarios that are just as fictitious

142 as the ones they are denying. They are horrified by the barbaric acts of savages who lived in other times, but they are really praising a false vision of nature and the existence of the rest of the forms of animal life. It seems that in civilization the logic of “taking what I like and leaving the rest” never stops. Sure, anyone can be comfortable thinking about the noble natives who lived free of hierarchies and authority, in harmony with nature, but when we speak of the Selknam and their patriarchy, the Calusa and their complex hierarchical society, or tribes that headhunted or trafficked in women, more than one of these noble-savage lovers averts their eyes and pretends to have no idea what you are talking about. And it is such a delicate point for secular anarcho-primitivists to accept that their idealized primitive humans worshipped deities. Of course, who doesn’t want to dream of a life without need of a paying jobs, walking calmly through the meadows picking mushrooms. But a life in the wild never was like that. We cannot state it emphatically enough: freedom is an illusion. Nature is not our mother, she is cruel, merciless, and yes, oppressive. Or at least that is how the hyper-civilized would see it. But for us, all this merely is, and what has always been. We don’t tremble at the movement of the tectonic plates, or when the tsunami makes a particular eco-system disappear. Nor are we taken aback when a crocodile eats its young or a tribe of savages strangles its babies. We got rid of our civilized prejudices, we killed our moral being. We blew to pieces those who sought to domesticate our bodies and minds. We accept reality, we look our truth in the eyes and we are NOT afraid. Zúpay

143 On Terrorism and Indiscriminate Violence

144 “We are not looking out for humans (that enormous contorted mass of alienated beings swarming everywhere), we are looking out for Wild Nature and reason has pushed us to radical action. Let it be very clear, our hand will not tremble when attacking with all means at our disposal that imposed reality as well as those who defend and sustain it.”

In recent times there has been a debate concerning the use of violence, especially types of violence such as indiscriminate and selective attack against human targets, and the practice of terrorism. And it seems that in anarchist circles there is a tremendous aversion to all that is not inoffensive sabotage. Using the excuse of their being easily replicated, they limit themselves to these sorts of attacks. That is why we read over and over again communiques claiming responsibility for actions filled with lots of words declaring war and fire to the prisons, cities, police stations, ministries, and palaces… clamoring for the blood of judges, kings, popes, ministers, and capitalists only to finally, at the end, claim responsibility for throwing paint on the front of a building, tagging graffiti, posting a sign, sealing a lock with silicone, or slashing some tires... There are some groups that go a bit beyond this, placing incendiary devices or explosives that have caused moderate to serious material damages, but again they limit themselves to that, while their guilty targets remain unaffected physically and legally. Also, in the last few years the laws have been changing, especially concerning terrorism. Governments aren’t stupid and they know that with societal dissatisfaction comes the emergence of groups or individuals that radicalize and begin doing their thing, so they end up cracking down in order to make an example of those who refuse to play by the rules of the game. In the past, authorities may not have given much importance to, for example, a “low level” incendiary attack, but today they take it as a serious threat, searching for traces of DNA or other evidence to catch the perpetrators, and if they catch them, harsher laws dic- tate charges of terrorism and longer stays in prison. That is why we have examples of groups or individuals who, without having killed

145 anyone, are serving sentences of hundreds of years for incendiary sabotage or explosive attacks against material targets. Stated in another manner, if you’re going to play the game, cause as much damage as you can, including against those responsible for our misery. Aside from that, respect for the sacredness of life seems to be taken out of the most rancid Christianity. We do not respect the lives of our enemies, we do not respect the life of the judge, the politician, those who pretend to be the lords of our existence. And neither do we respect the life of the slave who accepts their lashings with pleasure, or of the honorable citizen who accepts actively all that is just as it is. We also think that the value of life is over-inflated (if you could even call it “life”). Really it is reduced to a succession of predictable situations and monotonous and routine acts, a grey existence devoid of emotion and contact with nature; a cowardly and artificial existence that could be summarized as a life with one’s head down, waiting to die without having really ever lived. Of course there are different levels of responsibility in all of this: a person of higher position is not the same as their lackey employee. But the fact is that all of them form part of the same machine and make it function, and for that reason they are all valid targets. There is no collateral damage in this war because everyone, even us, is responsible for this current order and so civilization continues on. That is why we support indiscriminate or selective attack against human targets. When an attack is carried out, one cannot do it halfway. At the moment that we decide to hit a target, it is not important to us that people who have nothing to do with the target are in between us and it. If we want to strike at a target, we do it regardless of what happens. If we wanted to bomb an office of some company or a government building, it doesn’t matter to us if the explosion kills or maims workers, employees, the actual people responsible, or anyone else in, or passing by, the target building. The important thing is that the target has been successfully hit. There will be no warning calls, no one is innocent, and we are carrying out our attack regardless of any other considerations. That is why we speak of terrorism without any qualifications, while leftists and most anarchists are ashamed of that term. They reject it as “diabolical,” but we embrace

146 the term proudly and make it our own. For we really want to realize in live practice the purest meaning of the term. That is to say, we want to spread demoralizing panic and chaotic terror through brutal acts of savagery. Also, we refuse to leave to our enemies the exclusive right to use these or any other methods. If the civilized order uses terrorism and violence to perpetuate itself, we will fight them with terrorism and violence as well. Society is scandalized if a policeman is shot dead by a criminal, or if a bank or other structure is bombed (even if no one was hurt), or if one vandalizes some private or public property. And they rejoice when the demonized criminals, the terrorists and vandals, are caught and sentenced to rot away in prison, or simply mowed down by the “heroic” officers of law and order, or tortured or beaten in a cell of some dirty police station. Members of this society don’t hesitate to snitch against their own neighbors; some even try to play the hero and foil a crime. This society has no mercy on us and they only wish us ill. And we are the ones who have to be merciful? Society is indifferent, or better stated, it is an accomplice when their governments send their soldiers to bomb and kill indiscriminately in some faraway country to plunder its resources using lying excuses that no one believes (overthrowing tyranny to bring democracy, war against terrorism, etc.) Society is indifferent or an accomplice when all that is wild and natural is destroyed in the name of industrial progress and technological civilization. What does this society care about the destruction of the Earth, the poisoning of the water and air, and the artificialization of life as long as they have gas for their fucking cars, the shop windows are full of shit to consume, and they can avoid this miserable gray reality looking at Facebook on their new Smartphone or drugging themselves by watching the newest reality show to entertain their atrophied minds. The destruction of life and wild nature on this planet has reached the point of no return. Plants and animals are massacred daily, domestication and artificialization of all and every aspect of life. What does it matter that half the world is dying of hunger or thousands waste their lives in shitty jobs to benefit a system based on the application of daily violence in all its forms and variations… All of this does not scandalize the good citizenry. All of this is just

147 another news item on the nightly news. Nevertheless they scream to high heaven and it is the top story on all of the media if anyone burns a bus or alters even minimally the status quo. They would even drag through the mud those good-intentioned souls of the church of anarchism. At this point we would like to highlight again the hypocrisy of many anarchists, including self-proclaimed nihilists, who are scandalized by not only indiscriminate violence, but also any sort of violence whatsoever, especially if it is anything more than material damages even against those who are directly responsible. They admire those historical figures of anarchism (or Russian nihilism) of the late 19th and early 20th century who carried out attacks, robberies, and other barbarities where the bourgeoisie, judges, poli- ticians, snitches, bosses, exploiters, enemies in general were killed, but also many people who just happened to be in the way at the time. Without even having to go that far back, many anarchists admire and even hold up as an example those armed groups and guerrillas of the 1970s-1990s who in the majority of cases were of leftist or communist persuasion, and had values far from those of anti-authoritarians. These include the RAF of Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, ETA in Spain, and many similar groups in Europe or the Americas, as well as the Palestinian guerrillas. Armed groups often have a lot of deaths of innocent civilians to their credit. But even today the armed Kurds and Turkish left, who are held up as examples to be followed by many anarchists today, have carried out selective and indiscriminate attacks, where soldiers and police have fallen but so have those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All of this is justified and noble, however, because it takes place within their ideological framework while the attacks carried out by individualist nihilists or eco-extremists are severely criticized. This is due to the fact that any attack, group, position, or action of any type that falls outside of their atrophied logic is the object of criticism, accusations, defamations, and predictable insults that anarchos resort to when they encounter people who don’t play by their rules. The accusations are boilerplate: it’s psyops carried out by the State, or a product of paramilitary elements, agent provocateurs, fascists, authoritarians, psychopaths… What is all this

148 other than hypocrisy? In the course of history the majority of atrocities and tyrannies have been carried out in the name of civilization, the State, law and order, God and country, or of an ideology that in its epoch received the acceptance of the greater part of the social body. But when an individual guided by his egoist desire or one idea or another decides to arm himself and attack (robberies, attacks, sabotage, upris- ings…), the vast majority of society is scandalized and cries out for order to be imposed again by severe measures. By stating all of this we don’t want to make ourselves out to be the “good guys” against the other side who are the “bad guys.” We are only citing examples of the lies and hypocrisy of society, which has determined that a particular act is a crime or is “justice” based on who commits it and their motives (and this is the same hypocrisy that is shared by many anarchists who determine which attacks are carried out by “revolutionaries” and which ones are just the actions of a crazy person out for blood.) We reject this Christian concept of looking out for the well-being of one’s neighbor, that is, people who we don’t know and who, if they found out what we were up to, would cry out for us to be locked up or worse. What consideration should we give to society when society gives us no consideration whatsoever? We owe it nothing. Let us also remember that society, the masses, the citizen, from the humblest to the most wealthy, are directly responsible for the contemporary state of things through their ser- vile obedience, even if they only go along with it due to fear, comfort, or conformity. The status quo is not maintained by magic, it is maintained by most people accepting and reproducing it through their civic and political assent, defined roles, and attitudes. Disgust- ing civic morality characteristic of the domesticated modern human is the first barrier and one of the principle sustaining factors that maintains the civilized order. Police, armies, and bosses are not needed when the slave is their own jailer. Thus, no one is free from guilt and we won’t have any regrets if “civilians” are hurt in our attacks. If we said that no one is innocent, that’s not to say that everyone has the same amount of responsibility and plays the same

149 role. Obviously there are people with important positions; their elections or the functions they carry out are priorities, but if in attacks on these people or any other human or material target there is some collateral damage, we won’t shed a single tear over it. Nor will we show any signs of remorse. The same is the case if other groups decide that is it is a priority to attack society, that “swarm of alienated beings,” indiscriminately. These are the conforming masses, and whatever happens, the war continues. “In the War against Civilization and Progress, there is no such things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attacks, because this war is extremist and indiscriminate, or it’s no war at all.”

Fiera

150 151 For a Metropolis against Itself

152 The time has come, the time has come The vengeance is here and it won't end The shaman sung the icaros The river rose and took everything A gringo fell to the waters A boa swallowed him and then spit him out The rebellion of all animals Every spirit, every being, every god Got together to end the evils Of humans and their occidental methods Petroleum pollution Has the jungle sick with hate You can't hunt, you can't drink water But you can dance like in the ancient times! Anarkia Tropikal, “La Tierra Kontrataka”

Cities are a virus. No one really knows how they started, but from one moment to the next we transitioned from living in a constant equilibrium without a notion of time and progress, to living only by and for the virus, expanding and reproducing it until there are no more resources left or until we leave the empty shell of this planet to carry the virus to other worlds. If there is a true physical manifestation of civilization, cities are it. They are Leviathan made asphalt. They are as much part of us as we are part of them, and we carry them with us no matter how deep we enter in wild territory. Like it or not, they are our eco-system. Nevertheless, we are also a part of Leviathan. We are Leviathan at war against itself. We can't forget that civilization is not an ho- mogenous mass and that the concepts, for example, of Humanity and Society are as ridiculous as the concept of Global Revolution. As much as Mark Zuckerberg would disagree, my Third-World neighborhood has nothing in common with a German suburb, and an eco-extremist has nothing in common with a petroleum sheikh.

153 And I wonder, if we can be at war against our context, what other allies could we find in our situation? If we look at the tools that in other times have helped win battles against the colonizing advance of civilization, I can think of two answers (although more are always welcomed): The territory and the gods. The territory may seem the most obvious one, from the Ma- puche resistance to the Pirate Golden Age, passing through every guerrilla of recent history, the best weapon in asymmetric struggles has been the knowledge and use of space against the enemy. That's why cartography has always been an instrument of the settler. But we don't live in virgin forests and unknown seas anymore. Cartography and surveillance won, and we now live in streets completely mapped and patrolled, accepting voluntarily the tracking of our every movement. We need to develop a new way of moving through cities, accept them as our eco-system, and remember that the map is not the territory. We need to create a Metropolis against itself. The gods, on the other hand, may seem like a more counterin- tuitive answer. Weren't they killed by Humanism and buried below a thousand layers of concrete? Weren't their altars destroyed and replaced by crosses, churches, and martyrs? I think the question we need to ask instead is, how can they be gone if we are still here? The gods have always been as important as territory in this war, because they are two sides of the same coin. If I wanted to win a battle in this river, I would call the god of this river to help me. Our mistake is to believe that since the river is gone, since there are no more forests, there are no more gods. Gods change with us. We may have forgotten their names, they may have hidden under bridges and in tunnels, but they are still here. To find them we don't have to go looking for them in fenced parks or in pine forests or in artificial lakes, we just need to give a name to the gods of lead, gasoline, and smoke that surround us and keep us company in this war. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to sit and listen to that prophet dressed up in supermarket bags, or to follow stray dogs to their shrines. No one hates cops more than stray dogs do.

154 If we are going to fight this war, we need to learn to coex- ist with the Metropolis and to use every tool at our disposal. This essay wasn't meant to deliver answers, but to raise questions. Each one will know how to answer them differently depending on their situation. To all the friends who I don't know yet, and to all the enemies who aren't expecting me... I'm coming!

Eleuterio Pinto Paredes

155 Out of the Self: A Sermon for the Dead

156

“There was earth inside them, and they dug.” Paul Celan

“Isn’t it rather a pity that the void has no ears?” Pierre Klossowski

In the midst of a primeval forest there lies a vile and dark swamp. An ancient tree rises up from the putrid depths, its crown burnt by lightning. The tree does not speak, it is motionless, opaque. But its destiny is to liberate humanity from the curse of guilt. In the shape of this grotesque and mutilated tree, a presence can be perceived. Arms without a head. From it, a force emanates like a miasma. A force that attacks reason, that places one in opposition to others. In the force conjured by this tree is the experience of the presence of death. And through this confrontation, the veil is parted. Who will stand before the tree and bend the neck? And more importantly, who will wield the knife? To accept within the self the ultimate perversion, the ultimate crime, is the path to join the totality of creation. To unleash destruction upon the world as it exists, in full awareness and consciousness, is to gaze into the future of the world to be. “It is splendid as the lion in the instant he striketh down his victim. It is beautiful as a day of spring. It is the great Pan himself and also the small one. It is Priapos.” For Georges Bataille, Lord of Shit, Lord of the Slaughterhouse, the sacrifice becomes the foundation of the myth that will ensure survival in a world of war. The confrontation with the presence of death. The sacred and the profane are one in the same, as are death and eros. Duality exists, though it is an illusion. The “accursed share,” the part that represents holiness, death, silence, and expenditure, is denied by techno-industrial society. Only a vile accumulation remains. It chokes the sun. Excess is the path to liberation. It is a path that follows the bloody road of the war cults, sexual perversion, and sacrifice. It is the path of dynamism and force, movement and expansion: “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.” An explosion of cosmic forces. A rupture, through which the yawn- ing void can be perceived and its power flows forth. The influence

157 of accumulation is static, inert, bloodless. The movement of excess expenditure is ecstatic riot. To stand apart from oneself. Rituals of triumphant waste, destruction, and “euphoric social dissolution.” The festival, the potlatch, creates a liminal space, in which society collapses in upon itself. The rejection of economic use and pro- ductivity is asserted in games and the spectacle. Let us declare the reign of the unproductive, of immoderation, of the excessive, of the perverse!

“It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.” Bataille once wrote: “Our existence is the condemnation of all that is recognized today. What we are undertaking is a war. It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light.” Drum beats sound in the depths of the forest. In the homogeneity produced by techno-industrial society, action is only validated by its accumulative effects. All is subjugated. And to what? To a monstrous banality. In the confrontation with living death, we tear open the fabric of the world and become defiantly alive. We become utterly incommensurate, we become “a force or a shock that presents itself as a charge.” We embody excess, delirium, and barbarous war. We become fecal, beings of pure erotic power. We enter the realm of the bloodthirsty mob, the aristocratic warrior, madmen, dreamers, prophets, and poets. We reassert the sacred within the profane. We are those who refuse rule. From its infancy, techno-industrial society is defined by its aversion to filth. The horror of excrement is full of the horror of death. Thus we become denatured, cleansed, purged of our living essence, in a sterile universe. The movement of humankind is from filth to eroticism to death. In its denial of death, techno-industrial society has made the cosmos into an endless, empty sea.

“It is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.” As Bataille wrote, that “If this world is compared with worlds that have disappeared, it is hideous and seems the most failed of them all.” There was freedom and joy in the long-lost world of brutality. The magic of life has disappeared. It has been buried in the dusty tombs of forgotten history, with bones and trophies. A horde of women

158 with wild hair, closed eyes, and moaning mouths stumbling forward. They are wrapped in lion skins, they wear bull heads, and carry spears hidden in pinecones. Their breasts are bare and they joyously caress their bodies as they dance. They smear saliva on their genitals. Sweat drips from their red burning cheeks and snakes glisten and slither around their hips and thighs. They are pursued by bearded drunken brutes, who are singing and playing flutes and wagging their erect penises. Finally the Liberator comes, riding a chariot pulled by panthers and leopards. His features are dark and Asiatic. His beard is long and curly. Ivy creeps up his arms and legs. His eyes are bright but say nothing. The Roarer, the Goat Killer, The One in the Trees, The Great Uniter, The Hidden One. Dionysus comes to release humanity from its enslavement, enslavement to anxiety, to neurosis, to labor, to technology, to symbols, to power, to profit. He comes to kill the oppressors and free the wild. As he rose from the dead, so too will the spirit of the wild. With a touch from his fennel wand, madness reigns and walls tumble down.

“It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and at midnight.” A gathered crowd drinks the unmixed wine from wide bowls, and shrieks fill the night. Dionysus presides over the riot, looking on silently. Bataille’s words drift through the night, “in those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world of educated vulgarity.” To lose oneself, this is the goal. To break down the walls of the self and enter the flow of the universe. There is a world where this is still possible, out there somewhere among the wastes and barren deserts of techno-industrial society. How much we have lost and how little we have gained in return. There is pleasure in civilization but only mechanized, sterile, disembodied, callous pleasure. Pleasure that dulls the mind and body. Filtered through brutally repressive culture, through technology, and the domination of the symbolic, pleasure vanishes as soon as it dries. “They think to profit from civilization but by that profit have become the most degraded of all beings who have ever existed,” Bataille writes. Prof- it and accumulation have made humanity into a thing so weak that no animal on earth would ever envy us. The strong limbs of

159 the wild ones cry for exertion, they despise the flaccid, withering weakness of their counterparts, wasting in office chairs and com- muter trains, slowly decaying as they labor their lives away in servi- tude. Their profits don’t give them strength, happiness, or freedom. They cannot feel, they cannot experience ecstasy; they can only analyze and assess.

“It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness.” The revelers continue to drink and dance, mixing the blood of bulls with their wine until their eyes roll back in their heads and they enter the trance. Following the wheel of death and rebirth, Dionysus goes down into the sunken chambers beneath the earth. Ten times the soul must reenter the world before it is finally released. Older and more powerful by far than Zeus and his Olym- pian family, is Dionysus. The wild spirit of nature is older and more powerful than god. The wildness in humanity must be free for it will never accept its captivity and the longer it is restrained, the more wrathful it will become. Bataille writes, “Dionysus has gone down in order to ascend and now the Black One has begun to dance.” The movement beneath and within corresponds to the return to the sky and to the expansion into the cosmos. Like the serpent that burrows into the dirt so it can rise again. The star wants to descend on: So as to swim down below, down here Where it sees itself shimmer in the swell Of wandering words. (Paul Celan) Black Kali dances in the sky. Her feet, wet with the blood of her enemies, crush houses and flatten cars like ants. In one black hand she holds a bloody sword. In the other she holds the severed head of Shiva, her husband. She laps at the blood that drips from his pulsing veins with her long tongue and the rest of it pours down her bare breast and into her pubic hair. Drunk on blood, Kali spins and whirls, seeking new enemies to kill. She brings with her, terror, darkness, and chaos. Behind her come a host of thieves, prostitutes, the rotting dead, and the diseased. They rise up from the sea.

160 “It is the mightiest creature, and in it the creature is afraid of itself.” Kali demands blood and a thousand priests armed with a thousand cutlasses kill a thousand cows with a single cut to the back of the head. Fountains of blood paint the sky red. We knew the price of blood then. Bataille knew the price of blood, “we are deathly beings. Beings unto death. In the act of sacrifice we seek to kill the animal in us.” The revelation of consciousness is achieved through the death of the animal. If we could but perceive the death of our self, then we could alike perceive the portion that comes from the stars. But, tragically, the revelation never occurs. It is always deferred. For the human being dies when its animal nature dies. Thus we can never understand death because we cannot watch ourselves ceasing to be. Kali’s dance has now become so wild that the atoms of the universe themselves are beginning to rupture.

“It is the delight of the earth and the cruelty of the heavens.” For Bataille, the factory was the ultimate symbol of the repugnant world we inhabit: a world that denies death and life. “When I review my own memories, it seems that for our generation, out of all the world’s various objects glimpsed in early childhood, the most fear-inspiring architectural form was large factory chimneys...I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned in those giant scarecrows the presence of a fearful rage. A loathsome finger jabbing obscenely at the heavens. Defiant and yet asserting nothing. The pure essence of what is most violent and cruel in the world is represented in the clouds of smoke rising from the factory.”

“Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil. But the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.” Glaciers the size of continents drift into the sea from the icy poles and titan waves sweep away houses and roads. A giant teak coffin washes up on the shore next to me. I lift off the lid and inside is a dead man wearing a fine suit and top hat. He is taller than any man I have ever seen. His face bears the marks of intense age, not just old but from a different time. His wife, the spirit of the river Liffey, comes forward carrying a wicker basket filled with peat cuttings. She lays down her burden and unfurls a white cloth, which she spreads out on the soggy earth. She places the body of her giant

161 husband in the center of the cloth and surrounds him with silver platters and goblets. The river woman welcomes a grim procession of shadowy figures who emerge from the sea and circle around the body. As they prepare to begin the feast however, the body disappears. The guests then sit and tell tales of old Finnegan; of his sufferings at the hands of the Pirate Queen of Connacht, of sucking marrowbones in a stockade with one deaf man and one mute and talking of bison and Brian Boru, of surveying the field of ancient battles with his wife. Before long the mourners become uncouth and disorderly. One man accuses another of embellishing his story in an unseemly manner. The storyteller defends himself against such slander and threats come, followed by blows. In the course of the fight a glass of whisky is split and Finnegan’s corpse reappears. The giant leaps to his feet and begins roaring for whisky but his friends gently stuff him back into his coffin and promise him that the world he is in now is the better one. Each one of them raises their glass and they push the coffin back out to sea. Someday he will return: Finn Again.

“The dark gods form the earth-world. They are simple and infinitely diminishing and declining. The devil is the earth-world’s lowest lord, the moon-spirit, satellite of the earth, smaller, colder, and more dead than the earth.” In her anger and madness Kali hurls the severed head of Shiva into the air and it lands on the ground in front of me in an explosion of blood and brains. I push open his lips with my arms and step into his mouth. The long teeth hang down like stalagmites in a cave. I begin to pound and smash the teeth and tongue and cheeks with my fists. From the inside out I try to destroy the head. Bataille’s voice echoes among the shattered bones, “Human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery.” This is why Bataille called his secret cult of sacrifice acephale, headless: the utter denial and repu- diation of the head, the proud declaration of arms, the steel weapon, and the fiery heart. The spirits that haunt the head are worthless and drab. They condemn us to a world of emptiness. If we give ourselves fully to the annihilation of the head and the weak sense

162 of self that emanates therefrom we shall find ourselves again in a jungle-world teeming with life and bloody vitality. But no paradise of peace this, for the wild world is a savage one. Let us be clear, however, that there is no form of wild savagery and cruelty that is not more desirable in all forms than the one we currently inhabit. Bataille writes “The earth, as long as it only engendered cataclysms, trees, and birds was a free universe; the fascination with liberty became dulled when the earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law over the universe.” We need not fear the cataclysm! If anything, all we have to fear is the absence of the world-rending powers! The earth will do what it will, for all our laws and command- ments. Our reason cannot restrain the earth; it can only suppress our own happiness and freedom. “Let us escape.” Bataille says, “Let us escape from our heads like the condemned man from his prison.” Where there is freedom, existence is still a joyful game.

“Eros flameth up and dieth. But the tree of life groweth with slow and constant increase through unmeasured time.” I look up and where Kali stood, I now see a headless giant. His essence is both pure and profane. Where is his nagging, skeptical head? In his crotch, of course. But it’s a death’s head, a shining skull. His arms are spread wide over the world. In one hand he wields a stunning weapon of steel. In the other hand burns the blazing heart of Dionysus. His chest is tattooed with endless stars. His stomach is the endless labyrinth where we lose ourselves over and over again. Not man, not god but a monstrous spirit. The steel weapon obliterates the world. A dog barks. It’s late at night and I am standing with Bataille in a drafty house by the sea. The painter Andre Masson is in the kitchen drinking wine and humming along to a recording of Mo- zart’s Don Giovanni. We all sit down together around the table and imagine our own deaths. We sit for some time with our eyes staring off into the void. Bataille finally breaks the silence, “the lot and the infinite tumult of human life are not open to those who exist like poked-out eyes, but to those who are like clairvoyants, carried away by an upsetting dream that does not belong to them.” We dream the dreams of the other. My dreams are not my own. They belong to the soul of the world.

163 Masson’s little house is filled with his paintings. Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, getting fucked by a bull, wriggling and writhing in joy and agony. Endless labyrinths. Bull skulls. I enter the labyrinth through the door in the hand. I follow the stairs up the forearm. The skin of the walls is hard and white like cracked marble. Far below me, a giant pillar supports one leg at the knee. The other rests upon a swan. The Minotaur’s head above me has one eye and one horn. I crawl down into the chest and guts and find a flaming leaf.

“Now the dead howled and raged, for they were unperfected.” Pasiphae’s husband, the greedy king Minos, cared for nothing but wealth and neglected his wife’s hungry bed. In his absence, she grew itchy with desire and contrived to lay down with the holy bull. Ovid describes Pasiphae as a comic figure, dressing up in an elaborate cow costume, prancing in the field, and batting her bo- vine eyes flirtatiously at the object of her affection. But Pasiphae’s lust is darker and more profound. It represents the fierce need for humanity to acknowledge its primordial wildness. She named her monstrous son Asterion “The Ruler of the Stars.” But Minos, possessed by a civilized demon of greed and repression, couldn’t stand to see him. He had his servant, the slavish mathematician Daedalus, build an endless prison to contain the living, breathing proof that we are proud, beautiful, earthly, animal beings. And in that sun- less prison, despised Asterion became wrathful and horrible. He howled and beat on the stone walls with bones and demanded bloody sacrifices until the bland, beardless Attic hero Theseus came and slit his throat with his thin blade. How like the puritanical Greeks to imprison the spirit of the wild in a maze of reason. They worshipped at the altar of the intellect and hated the ecstasy of freedom and spontaneous experience. When Dionysus came to them from the unknown forests of the East, they crucified him because they feared the truth: that he came to tear down the hollow, dishonest edifice of humanity that they had constructed. The spirit of the wild is the power of the earth that burns inside of us as it does in the fibers of every living thing, it cannot be

164 denied, shut away, or repressed until the earth itself turns black and burns away into nothingness and here at the end of the world, like in every age before us, it will fight to be free. See how things all come alive— By death! Alive! Speaks true who speaks shadow. (Paul Celan)

Abraxas

165 Eco-extremism and the Woman part 1

Introduction This article, which will be divided into two parts, discusses a topic that has not been given much importance within the tendency, at least publicly. We speak of the relationship between eco-extremism and women. Women, just like men who lived in groups before techno- industrial civilization, had a particular role to play in primitive tribes. They had a unique way to relate with their environment. Today in modernity, women also play a very important role within the war that we are waging. It may not be the same as before, but we continue to be immersed in our environment in which we develop in unique ways. This article discusses views of what it means to be a female eco-extremist in this environment, and also incor- porates a talk among those in complicity on this topic, which will form the second part, and perhaps another surprise.

166 Hello eco-extremist woman. There are many things that I would like to tell you, some even “prohibited.” Not having a person of affinity physically near me sometimes feels suffocating and sometimes I feel that I could blow at any minute. Still I remain firm as a fierce she-wolf who looks like another white sheep in the mass of the disgusting flock. I’ll say a little about myself. Years ago I denied my gender. Like a good anarchist I rejected the concept and I considered myself to be “asexual” or “queer.” Today I regret that past but I have recognized it as part of a cycle, an integral part of what I once was that has led to what I am today. Those feminist positions remain in the past since I realized that nature made me a woman, and proudly so, not due to a question of gender but for a much greater and stronger question, one which I don’t have to force myself much to comprehend. You know, humans are always looking for a way to find a theory of everything; any science is occupied with that. They feel that they have a “reasonable” explanation for everything, but they really know nothing. They only know weak anthropomorphic concepts that are only convincing to humans. That is why I don’t focus on understanding “why” I am a woman. I simply came into the world this way and even though reality is much harsher for us on some occasions, this serves to harden our character and to grow as warriors. As you will know, at this time feminism is a compelling fashion, and even though it is hard for me to accept it, if this fashion had come into being when I still had those ideas some years ago, I would have accepted the label and would now be condemning “macho” men and denouncing instances of sexual harassment that never happened. But luckily, this feminism came too late for me, as I have escaped this trap of the system some moons ago. The Western view is for one to look upon oneself as a woman as a victim of everyone and everything. It forces you to focus on dumb struggles that only distract from the true problem: Civiliza- tion. The system benefits when we look for the guilty amongst ourselves, and when we turn our anger on men, immigrants, the

167 justice system, the state, the speciesists, etc. Thus, going along with all of the ephemeral struggles makes us part of the herd, but of a black herd: the supposedly “rebel” one, which one realizes is not even the case. I have not wanted to remain thus. I have accepted my existence as a woman, and I have declared war without quarter on civilization, and not on a model of a system of domination called patriarchy. The eco-extremism that I defend is not focused on gender. I have wounded both men and women equally, since this war is against civilization as a whole. Though the gender of the target is not important, at the same time I realize that as an individualist my condition as a woman is in what I have done. Maybe I don’t recog- nize it publicly for strategic reasons, but I do with those in affinity. I have cured the wounds of my man with herbs that I have collected. I have wept because of his absence and have received him back with an open heart after an attack. I have counted the money he robbed from banks and have held his hand fleeing from arsons that we committed. I have hid the gun with which he has murdered people from police since this foolish system dictates that a woman can’t murder, or that she can’t kill with a bomb, for example. I go along with my feminine characteristics since nature made me this way. I am an individual but I realize at the same time that my male companion completes me, and in that I find neither subjugation nor a relationship of power as the politically-correct modern commentators would put it. These people disgust me. I see us just as if we were a lemur couple: together, playful, united, and wild. In the culture of my ancestors, the woman was the wise one, even wiser than the shaman. She was the one who guarded the fire of war, and only when the situation was favorable did she give the fire to the warriors so that they might go and take the lives of their enemies. The woman is the one who guards the word and the wisdom of the spirits. Some ask if there exists in reality a space where furious action of the feminine spirits can be unleashed. That space is within us, female eco-extremists, in our words and our acts, by ourselves or with our clan. I, as I have stated to you before, have guarded these jealously for the next strike, but as to whether our place is in the savage attack of our female ancestors, of this there is

168 no doubt. Without anything further, eco-extremist woman, I bid farewell, intoning the chants of the moon, with one hand full of medicinal plants and the other holding a knife that will go into the jugular of the enemy.

Meztli Full moon of April 2017 Chikomoztoc

Eco-extremist women speak

Do you think that it is more difficult for a woman to adopt the eco-extremist tendency than it is for a man? Yoloxochitl: I believe it is relative. The attraction of the Tendency is many times the product of the life that you have led, the conditions in which you find yourself, and the situations that you face daily. This is evident through the number of individualists who have been positioning themselves in our favor recently. An individualist in Europe can be attracted to eco-extremism through the same hatred of civilization that could be felt in the Americas or on another continent. The experience is the same in both the man and the woman. The hatred of this artificial reality is a shared one. This transcends borders, languages, cultures, and also genders. More: What a coincidence as this is a theme that I was talking about with other sisters in the Tendency not too long ago. And my answer is this: yes and no. Sometimes it is difficult for a woman to adopt eco-extremism due to the fact that, as we are in the era of suffocating and diseased feminism, many women are attracted to progressivist trash. Especially within “radical” circles, either anarchist or communist, feminism is the order of the day, it’s the “in” thing. Eco-extremism is seen as a psychopathic position, at least in Mexico, and to be honest, who would dare to be against all that has been established in the present time? Who dares to launch a criticism against all and act accordingly? Very few, and I am not saying that women should be attracted to eco-extremism as opposed

169 to feminism. Of course not, but I am only saying that our present situation makes the existence of more people with affinity to our Tendency difficult. Most cannot reject the values that the vast majority of people defend. It’s difficult, but we are here. We don’t need to be many, we just need to be dangerous, that’s it.

Do you believe that eco-extremism is something that one lives differently as a woman as opposed to a man? Yoloxochitl: In some aspects I believe this is the case. For example, in the question of using traditional medicine, we are those who carry the baton since, from ancestral times, women have been the ones who have preserved with pride the knowledge of the arts of healing of the Earth. Certainly spirituality is more powerful in us women than in many eco-extremist men. Here I am mentioning a relative and not absolute superiority based on my own individual experience as an eco-extremist woman. But of course I don’t doubt that somewhere there is an eco- extremist man who has knowledge of ancient medicine and that his powers and spiritual practices are of an advance level due to, perhaps, a closeness to native roots. More: Yes, we women know how to cure with plants and the men don’t, haha! I’m joking, but in all seriousness, one does live eco- extremism as a woman, that’s for sure. Women and men are different, we have never been equal, so living our eco-extremism is always different. On this, we can turn the whole victimization of women that people obsess over today to our favor. Perhaps it’s a bit harder for a male eco-extremist to go unnoticed when carrying out an attack against a target. But a “poor and helpless woman”? In many cases, this perception of the woman as the “weaker sex” can be a double-edged sword.

What do eco-extremists think of gender? Is it a question of nature or nurture? Yoloxochitl: It’s a natural question that civilization has made into a social, political, economic etc. question. Gender exists among various species to propagate those species, and this is also the case with human beings. But in the last case that natural inclination has been perverted and it has been weighed down by all of those excess

170 humans swarming all over the place. Nature is so wise that she has made it so that a life can grow within a woman. If you think about it, it’s a magical thing, from the fertilizing of the egg to the birth of a child, it is a process involving numerous glands, hormones, enzymes, etc. This is what the Unknowable has gifted us, only the modern human doesn’t know how to appreciate this. There are women who give birth one after the other, up to five or eight kids, stupidly just like that. They are only good for spreading their legs and aren’t even responsible for the consequences. This situation makes my misanthropic hate grow by the day. I value my condition of being a woman, but I hate women who are trapped in the vi- cious cycle of human suffering. More: Gender for me is a question of nature. We were born women for a reason and I thank Nature for that. I have never denied my condition of being a woman, and I am proud of it. I love being a woman, my sensual femininity, the cycles I share with the moon, my physical characteristics, and the like. Society has taken it upon itself to make gender seem like it is something obsolete. They say that we are all the same; their mouths are filled with useless diatribes about the equality of genders. This makes me laugh because they do this only when convenient. They bark about equality of genders when a man is beaten, but when the man fights back, they say it’s machismo, misogyny, and other things of that sort. Who gets this stuff? They wanted equality, didn’t they? Many women don’t realize that this is precisely what the system wants: to make all equal so that everyone can serve the same system and perpetuate it, regardless of gender, race, economic condition, language, etc.

What do you think of patriarchy? Yoloxochitl: It is a just another system of domination that we have to deal with. It’s been inserted in our head that Western society is completely based on patriarchy, but it also has some aspects of matri- archy involved as well. They don’t tell us that so as to not scandalize the masses of stupid women who scream that such-and-such-a- thing is a product of patriarchy every time something “oppresses” them.

171 More: It’s an excuse for the feminists to continue their sorry campaign regarding the whole gender issue. They just seek to play the bigger victim and continue their social campaign to include women even more in the system they claim to hate and are perpetuating by their efforts.

Even though eco-extremists don’t deny our condition as man or woman, what do you think of the characteristics that the market and media has given both genders? For example, de-sensitizing men at early stages of emotional development, or the forced submission imposed on girls, relegating them to a secondary role in the service of men and placing their own desires and motivations second, the dependence of women on the man for important things, the overvaluing of sex for the man, leading him to live with a constant obsession for it, and linking his access to sex with social recognition, etc. (This is what came into my head but obviously more could be said. If anything else pops in your head you can mention it as well.) Do you think it is important to separate yourself from these characteristics? Yoloxochitl: In terms of women, I think that the culture of the market has very much influenced them. This all comes from a series of Western cultural factors that has made men and women forget that they coexisted fully at a certain point in human history. Now of course this has been forgotten. Historical amnesia is contagious, and it is necessary to see the past to find ourselves, to rescue our roots and intelligently not reproduce the same values that have been repeating themselves for generations. It is clear that the market and the media have harmed our essence so that it now takes some work to find it again. But as I have said, we have to separate ourselves from Western moralistic and humanistic conceptions so that we can have another perspective. More: Not only is it important to separate oneself from the characteristics previously mentioned, but it is a necessity made into a desire of the inhumanists. I am very much aware of all that you have stated, all insensibility found in men as well as women is generated by the media, the education imposed on us from when we were girls, the shit exchanged for gold in this era of artificial complacency. Before all of this, I know it is necessary to be complicit with individualist men and women, and to harden oneself against any humanist moral

172 or civilizing indecision contaminating the air of this necropolis. Re- finding your “I” is one of the most important tasks that we have, and completing it should be our priority.

What do you think of the fact that people use the feminine as an insult, as in when they say that this man was weak like a woman, or he fought like a woman when stating that he didn’t know how to fight? Yoloxochitl: I think that those insults are old. Today I hear more frequently people saying that weakness or cowardice is more related to being homosexual, with gays being the object of ridicule and not women. Either way, civilization has made modern women weak, they have been seen as a symbol of inferiority for so long, but before, I remember my grandparents talking among themselves about how women in their time were considered more resistant to certain aspects of the hard life, such as work in the field or tolerat- ing birth pangs, for example. As I said, today I see that when someone doesn’t know how to fight (for example) more often than not they are dropping the word “faggot” or “fairy,” and no longer make references to women, though I am sure the people who use “woman” as an insult still exist. I think that it is part of civilized culture, and I am not scandalized in the least by it. If at some point someone tells me that to my face, maybe I’ll let it slide or maybe I’ll rearrange their face, it depends on how I feel at the moment. More: Those insults make me laugh, and, you know, this is a very complex topic, because not only does this involve “macho insults” or whatever someone interprets as a macho insult due to an inferiority complex, but also touches on themes of inferiority. Let’s consider some examples, say, the survival of Inuit nomads (often misnamed Eskimos). Their way of life is based on hunting and fishing, so that the men provide the greater part of the food needed for the subsistence of a small tribal group. Not having a variety of flora in the North Pole, women had the role of raising the children and on occasion they could collect moss and various small plants. But in this, where is the weakness? Is the Inuit woman weak for taking care of the children and collecting a small quantity of plants while the man was off hunting sea lions and waiting for hours

173 to trap a seal or large fish on his hook? I don’t think this is the case. Each Inuit person, man or woman, had their part to play in their way of life, one could not exist without the other. They are part of a beautiful symbiosis, where one finds real support in the other. Another example could be found in the bands of Bushmen. As with the Inuits, the men are charged with the hunting of gazelles, birds, rabbits, etc. in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, while women take care of the children, and, when the hunt is scarce, they collect ber- ries, plants, fruits, seeds; dig for tubers; etc. They say that at that time of year, men practically live off whatever the women collect without moving a finger. Here the modern human would accuse the men of being freeloaders, but that’s not the case. As I said, there is a part of the year when the animals are scarce since they have migrated or they’re dying due to thirst, and the men can do nothing about it. Going out and trying their luck in the dry season would only leave them hungrier and more exhausted. Thus the women provide for them until the time comes when conditions are better to go out and hunt. Should the men among those groups be considered weak because they let the women feed them instead of going out and getting their own food during the dry season? No, among the Bushmen the men and women complement each other, one is for the other and that’s it. And, well, in the modern era that would vary quite a bit. Obvi- ously we are not in the same situation, and I think along with Yo- loxochitl that the modern woman considers herself to be the weaker sex and is always playing the victim before the dominant male.

What are the primitive and ancestral features that you associate the most with your femininity? Yoloxochitl: Menstruation, the “sixth sense” (if you can call it that), wise sayings, the knowledge associated with the art of curing with plants, the capacity to perpetuate oneself not only in the species, but as a “being apart,” the maternal protection of the affinity group, the serenity to see things from an objective perspective, being able to wear your heart on your sleeve, etc. More: The female body being in sync with the cycles of the moon. It still is impressive to me how the moon has a marked influence on women and they don’t even notice. For me, this is a point that

174 one has to emphasize, the intimate relationship between women and nature. There are others things I could mention but these are the most important.

Are there any ancient female warrior role models that you know of and you look up to? Yoloxochitl: There are many examples of women who left inspiring stories in our ancestral paths, and I always keep these foremost in mind. Some have names, but others don’t. Personally I like to remember those who history has forgotten, those who are only mentioned in passing. I could mention many here, but I always like to remember the women who were part of the Mixton War in northern Mexico in the 16th century. As many know, when the Spanish troops had the Teochichimeca warriors surrounded on Mixton Hill and Nochistlan Rock, their hopes for victory were non-existent and that’s when the Teochichimecas decided to realize “until your death or mine:” fighting to the death against the invader. When all of the male warriors had been killed, that is when the women along with their children threw themselves as human projectiles against the Spanish who were climbing up the steep hill. Thus they showed that they were not willing to submit to domination by the foreigners and they preferred to die instead. That’s the type of woman I remember, the ones who in their last moments gave their lives to be able to maintain their true essence. More: Women like Tuira Kayapo, who violently opposed the ar- rival of petroleum exploration in the Amazon and even struck the representative of Petrobras with a machete during one of his meetings with the Kayapo tribe. The elder Kiepja, wise woman, the last Selknam descendant who nurtured the ancestral imagination with her stories and tales, and who filled the air of the huts of the most important tribes of the southern continent with pagan lore. Maria Sabina, native healer of Mexico, expert in the use of powerful plants. The only thing that angers me about this one is that her teachings were used by the idiotic youth in search of “trips” in the alternative drug counterculture of the 1960s.

175 A Note on Reproduction from the Eco-Extremist Perspective

176 There is no doubt that we are living in a very difficult situation, going through a process of mass extinction that the planet has not seen in a long time. The progress of civilization is destroying the few wild places that we have left, while increasing the domestication in the minds of modern humans. Still, we remain like caged animals, sick from domestication. We still maintain deep within ourselves the primitive core of our being, and a few of us bind ourselves to it with all of our strength. I have heard more than once the now-clichéd line: “Who would want to bring another person into the world?” My response for a long time was, “Not me, never.” But I have begun to have my doubts on this issue. At first glance, it seems illogical that people who consider themselves to be enemies of the civilized reality--and of humanity itself--would consider the possibility of reproducing themselves. We see ourselves surrounded by millions of people all the time, their faces make me both sick and angry. I am one who would prefer that my species go extinct. But you know what? I can’t do anything about that, none of my actions will significantly influence the fact that masses of humanoids swarm the Earth. In fact, we can’t change things no matter what we do; we don’t really matter at all. It is for this reason that I discard any external motivation to do anything, and I can only base things on my own desires and will. These are my only guides on the rough sea of life. Yes, of course, the majority of my desires are conditioned. They aren’t really what I want, many things that I experience in daily life are forced upon me and I know this quite well. Thus I look beyond the cities of concrete and metal toward the remaining wild spaces: how the animals there run free. The lessons that I most value are found there, since I know I am made of the same material as they. At the end of the day, I am no better than a bush or a cricket. Modern humans like to think that they aren’t merely stupid animals. This is especially the case with anarchists. They would like to think that their interests and motivations are more complex, more difficult to understand, but that explanation is only believable in their domesticated heads. In the physical realm, we aren’t any-

177 thing more than confused monkeys who want to deny everything, even our true instincts. They will rationally decide not to reproduce themselves, because they do not want to bring another being into the world. But guess what? This is the only world that we have, and these “defective” organisms are the only ones that exist. There will not be another world, at least not one that we will ever see. Your personal decisions won’t affect anyone but yourself. It’s the same with leftists and anarchists when they say things like, “Wait, it’s not time to wage the armed struggle or commit violent attacks. The conditions aren’t right yet.” What “conditions” are you talking about? I only want to satisfy my darkest and most primitive desires, those that long for the bloody wounds of disgusting human flesh, that fantasize about the cries and screams of horror of the hyper-civilized. These are the same desires that make me want to reproduce. Thus, there is no reason at all to justify my longing to have children, at least not one that would satisfy the most complex and modern minds. I only know that I long to do it, to unite myself with my woman and unleash our desires, the most evil and dangerous, as well as the most loving and tender. To unite ourselves for a love without limits, moral or any other type. To procreate and live wherever we like. I think of that child not yet born and I already feel love, a real union, sincere, a caring love that protects and sus- tains. And if as an adult they would get up the courage to ask why we decided to bring them into the modern world knowing how disgusting it is, I will perhaps respond, “I was only being the animal that I am, and now you have the opportunity to be so as well: the marvellous opportunity to connect yourself to an ineffable force; to do the same before the wild majesty of the world is extinguished completely.”

178 179 Eco-extremist Spiritual Exercises

180 “Et introibo ad altare Dei”

I came from an evangelical family, but I have long ago disposed of the values that it taught me. I became a humanist, and coming to believe again and rejecting atheism was a tremendous blow to the gut. I had to start again with another vision, a very personal and particular one for sure. It took some work, but afterwards I understood that my belief in something more had never left, and really I don’t pray, since I understand praying to be repeating things, and I don’t like doing that since in my upbringing we didn’t say prayers but talked to God. I do this still (in specific moments of course), to welcome solstices, to express gratitude for the coming of a new lunar phase, and especially for a red moon; to be thankful for the cold, the heat, the rain, the air, and fire. There are rituals that I like to perform. I have skulls of wild and domesticated animals on my altar, where I burn copal. In the Mesoamerican traditions copal represents spiritual cleansing. Four times a year (the Mexica year, not the Gregorian one) I go to sacred places with an offering. These are places sacred to me and not my ancestors--their sacred places are covered with commercial buildings and highways. I come to the four holy places with offerings like river stones, mesquite branches, tallow candles, and coals from the last fire (four things). On my knees I speak to the environment, almost always before a tree, a rock, a river, or a ravine (four things). There I smoke a birch pipe, mixed with salvia, eucalyptus, domesticated mint, and Lacandon tobacco (four things). These are the only times I smoke and it’s not to get high or anything like that. Those herbs don’t make one hallucinate and only serve to assist medita- tion, as they did for my ancestors. I have indicated that four is an important number for me, as it is for many cultures. There are four phases of the moon, four sea- sons of the year, four cardinal directions, and four things over the earth (stars, the sky, the moon, and the sun.) Four things breathe, those that swim, that fly, and those of four legs and two legs. Four are the most important forces in Mexica culture: quetzalcoatl, huitzilopochtli, xipe totec, and tezcatlipoca.

181 You can make your own prayers, your own disciplines; knowing what you know it will probably not be difficult, as there are probably always herbs, animals, figures, hours, and certain prayers involved. You should pick what is right for you, seek what element of the earth you most identify with; something can grow out of that base.... There are other “crazier” rituals, like blood offerings of my own blood spilled out on those skulls for protection, or cutting one’s knees so that the blood flows down to the earth as a sign of connection to it as the traditional dancers do over here. They also sometimes puncture their earlobes with maguey thorns until they bleed. I do “baptisms of fire” to end one cycle and begin another, with what is known as the “new fire,” I make a friction fire with a drill made of two eucalyptus sticks (the drill) and and one of quiote (a large stalk of the flower of the blue maguey plant) as the base. When the sticks get red hot, I say some words and burn my skin. Well, that’s a little extreme, but I believe that pain is inevitable, suffering is only one option. I believe that pain makes us stronger, spiritually and physically, so getting burnt is no big deal, nor is getting a cut or scrape that hurts for some days. I know that my beliefs are marked on my body. As I said, you can make your own disciplines and be your own guide, knowing that the master is watching and teaching you valuable things every day.

“Permiso wacho” Like you it was an effort to start believing again (but not to believe in that something, more to get out of my head that dumb anarchist habit of atheism). I go to a hill, that’s as far and wild as I tend to go. I don’t carry out more significant rituals right now. I always look for the moon at night; I greet her and ask her to protect my steps. I ask her to give me strength, and really just converse with her, always barefoot with my feet on the earth. I like to feel the cold, I think it’s really necessary. It’s true that the cold can be unbearable, but modern humans can’t stand many things. So I try to bear it and I feel it in my bones; just as I feel the heat in summer, the cold in winter can’t be missed.

182 I also do the other thing. When I take out a plant or a branch or flower to drink or for another use, I always ask permission. When I take leaves to make lemon verbena tea, I always say in a colloquial manner, “excuse me, buddy” or “excuse me, brother” and then I pull the leaves off. Really, being the civilized person that I am, I try to renounce civilized vices and customs as much as possible. I go into the wild by myself and contemplate the stars. I converse with the insects. I remember when I was a teenager I prayed every day before going to bed, “Our Father who art… bless my family, give me health… etc.” The thing is, it was just going through the motions, and at no point was I sincere and real. It got to the point that even thinking about praying put me off, but I did it because they said that that was how you loved Christ. I always found that very con- stricting, having to do it out of obligation. Always before going out into the street and especially before an action, I commend myself to the spirits of the Fuegians, I thank them and I ask them for protection. My intention is to immerse myself in all of this, learn things that the ancients did, to bring them back in our current age.

Friday night lights My epiphanies come at odd and inopportune times. The last one was at a high school football game. My two children wanted to go to a football game, where they consumed snacks and drank soda, and observed their older peers participating in this ritual of subur- ban life. I often think, “what this place was like before civilization.” It is not hard, as the waters and greenery always seem to be spilling in where they are not wanted by us, the hyper-civilized. I read about the lives of the people who lived here before the Europeans, what they ate and what they made their houses of; about their gods and taboos. It’s hard to imagine and yet so simple. Over the stadium lights, I saw the canopy of pines, and beyond them, perhaps a cypress swamp, and then the rivers, the lake, the seas… And all of the possums, armadillos, deer, foxes, and raccoons crawling in them. If my mind’s eye were sharper, perhaps I would see the ghosts of the cougars, bears, wolves, and bison who also once roamed these woods. I tried to look over civilization to see what is before and

183 beyond it, but my vision did not reach that far. My eyes returned to the game and those blaring lights on a Friday night… That is the real epiphany: our failure to see, our realization that we are not worthy of seeing what is beyond and above our dark reality. “Worthy” here does not denote moral judgment, but a metaphysical one. We will not see because we can’t, and the reason we can’t inheres to our innermost being. We no longer see the world as we should, the stars can no longer direct us home, the forests do not nurture us, the animals now are only pests. Even if we worked a lifetime, we would not redeem ourselves. We are the product of this order, and we are defeated as long as it continues. Some would say that we, the freaks and psychopaths of society, should just commit suicide, that we should just leave everyone else in peace to continue with their dreams of a better society or of the continuance of society just as it is. No thank you, as long as you’re here I will not be able to sleep soundly in the grave. Even if my only vocation is to, under my breath, mock your affected enthusiasm and fake smiles, it will be worth it. The realization of my smallness and helplessness before the Unknowable (lo Desconocido, deus ignotus) is enough of a prayer for me, and my hatred of those who think themselves more than this smallness is the only sacrifice I can give. But what is the Unknowable? Who is he, or she, or it? From my youth, I have sought it, I have longed to take shelter under it, to stay in that moment when it engulfs me, brings me into itself, and unites with me. But when I became a man, finally I learned that you only catch moments of it. You can’t reproduce it, you can’t buy it off. There’s no way to summon it from Heaven or from wherever it dwells and it will come down. I stopped being a materialist because I realized that the One, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and Love exist, but not in any way we can grasp completely, perma- nently, surely. As soon as we grab for them, they are already slipping through our fingers... But I have seen the splendor of the Unknowable: in the fingers of flame that is the sky over the pampas, or on a mountain outside of Cordoba in Argentina, in the pitch black dome of the firmament over the Mojave Desert, in the rocks battered by the sea off of Point Lobos, in the chorus of birds high above the swamp… I saw it most

184 lucidly when I held my eldest child for the first time. I realized then that I would never understand it, that whatever makes it what it is is not something for me to comprehend or dominate. I don’t own it, no one does. It is in the very act of being a mortal animal that it strikes us as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans spoken of by theologians. We know we are smaller than it, we cry for it like a nursing child cries for its mother. It may come, or it may not, but it will always leave again, because its fullness would probably break us. All philosophy, all morality, all law, all art, all literature, all culture, are nothing before it. They are almost a blasphemy against it. We need these blasphemies because we can do no other, but when the Human thinks that it is supreme--that it creates the fruit of the Unknowable’s labor and genius--it is at that point that the Human becomes repugnant, vile, and worthy of attack. I don’t consider myself a nihilist because I reject as in a tantrum all that is good and beautiful in this world (even that which could be discerned to be the “products of civilization”). I am a reluctant nihilist because I believe that those feats of genius, those things that make life beautiful or worth living, are not the product (or at least not the sole product) of the Human. Their order and splendor lie elsewhere; thought, culture, law, morality, etc. can only serve as the vessels of the Unknow- able that floats high above them like an elusive source of light. All the same, on this night, or in the moments when I can look out the window at work early in the morning, the times I bring the water to my face in a lake or river, the quiet few minutes when the mosquitoes buzz in my ear at sunset, then I know that the Un- knowable will one day take me too. One day, I will return to the great current that pulses at the heart of everything, and on that day I will be grateful that I will no longer have to fight or be a coward. I will finally hear (without hearing) the Human silenced even if I am silenced as well, and the Still Small Voice of Wild Nature whis- pering eternally in the branches.

Chicomoztoc—Karukinká —Nanih Waiya December 2017

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